


Don't Give Out with Those Lips of Yours

by Neftzer_nettlestonenell



Series: The Don't Series [3]
Category: Robin Hood (BBC 2006)
Genre: Alternate Timeline, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Robin Hood, Channel Islands - UK, Commandos, F/M, Gen, German occupation, Guernsey, Nazis, Sark - Freeform, Special Ops, WWII, big band music, channel islands, ham radio, swing music
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 01:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29925957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neftzer_nettlestonenell/pseuds/Neftzer_nettlestonenell
Summary: In which is addressed a thing or two about loyalty, unexpected visitors arrive to the Channel Islands, Kommandant Vaiser is discomfited, Geis betrays and is betrayed, and Marion lives to fight another day.+Loyalty is at stake on all sides, as Gisbonnhoffer tries to work out the holes in the story of Marion’s kidnapping, as well as continues to doggedly pursue tracking down the Nightwatch. And Mitch endeavors not to break to the German’s diabolical new torture device.
Relationships: Marian of Knighton/Robin of Locksley
Series: The Don't Series [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/298851





	1. Part One begins - LONDON British SIS HQ

****

_"I just got word from the guy who heard, from the guy next door to me.  
The girl he met just loves to pet, and it fits you to a 'T'.  
...Don't sit under the apple tree, with anyone else but me...  
Don't go walkin' down lover's lane, with anyone else but me...  
Don't give out with those lips of yours, to anyone else but me,  
Not until you see me, not until you see me marching home."_

**ENGLAND - London, HQ British Secret Intelligence Service - October 1943 -** The film projector, as with many of this department's aging, over-used audio-visual supplies, was not entirely top-drawer, but it did function well enough to suit a one-man audience, at work in a small, almost-cupboard-like space designated for classified filmstrip viewing.

The particular title currently on show had clearly been originally intended for the enrichment of British school children, but much like the machine that showed it, nonetheless served its function.

" _King John, who came to the throne upon the death of his brother, Richard the Lionhearted,_ " the filmstrip's authoritative, yet chipper, presenter announced, " _lost Normandy, and all other French possessions, to Philip Augustus of France. At this time, as it was strategically important to secure the ongoing loyalty of the Channel Islands, King John decreed the Islands could continue being governed according to Norman, rather than English, laws. Hence, a separate system of government was formed, with the British Monarch ruling the islands as 'Duke of Normandy', a title and endowment which King George proudly retains yet today._ "

Roger Stoker glanced down at the file lying on the desktop in front of him, straining to see the information typed there under the filmstrip's ever-wavering light, like a wayward schoolboy trying to covertly read notes or fold a paper airplane in class.

Rather than a full-on read-through, which he would save for a later time under better lighting, he glanced about here and there among the listed bullet-point statistics.

" **Weather:** _temperate, compared to mainland Britain. Mild damp and cloudy winters_.  
 **1941:** _all non-native islanders and all officers of The Great War deported to mainland Germany in reprisal for Germans made to leave Iran; at the ratio of 10 islanders for every Iran-based German deported_.  
 **Military strength:** _one German for every 2 islanders, total average. Locally, per island, ratio varies wildly. Alderney is without civilian population, now used entirely by Germans for islander or shipped-in prisoners. Herm is without a permanent German presence. Sark's population of 471 islanders has fewer than 100 soldiers in residence_.  
 **Main dialects of Norman in use on the islands:** _Auregnais (Alderney), Dgernesiais (Guernsey), Jerriais (Jersey), Sercquiais (Sark)_.  
 **Alderney Camps:** _Four in number, inmate population estimated 6,000_.  
 **SIS Operations** _for raiding & reconnaissance, chief aim, intelligence gathering - to take German prisoners: Ambassador, Branford, Basalt, Dryad, Huckabuck. In process: Pellinore (Sark). In queue: Hardtack 28 (Jersey), Hardtack 7 (undecided, pre-planning stages)._.  
 **British Government's Official policy for the Occupation:** _passive cooperation_.  
 **Documented Resistance:** _Jersey 6d note, designed under Occupation force, when folded can be made to display Victory 'V'; King's initials, 'GR' visible on new 3p stamps. Various underground newspapers, dissenting leaflet distribution. Confirm presence of stranded SIS Unit '1192'. Nightwatch - unknown._ "

 _'Nightwatch - unknown'_ Wait. He thought he had a tape on that. He rummaged about in the standard manila folder he had been given full of maps, sea charts and further intelligence gathered since the Occupation began.

As he rummaged, the color filmstrip droned on, showing a seemingly endless progression of idyllic harbor streets lined with shops quaint or jolly, and beach views; charming local children riding among vividly blooming flowers on horse-drawn carts bound for market day.

Truthfully, he could think of nothing so much when viewing these images as a seaside holiday, a relaxing stop into one of the many cafes on display. Stoker knew Sir Winston was said to be far from pleased with demilitarizing the Islands and letting them negotiate their own surrender to the Jerries, leaving British people at the mercy of Hitler's madness.

Looking at these pictures now, taken and assembled into this lightweight travelogue of a curious corner of the Empire, Stoker found he had trouble not thinking they'd really gone and just given the Jerries a damn-fine place for some R-and-R. Going on four years of it, now. But the end, _hopefully_ , in sight.

 _Ah, here it was_. A tape marked, ' _Nightwatch - signal origination: Guernsey_ '. He found the room's reel-to-reel machine and fed the slender tape through to the other reel, engaging the player.

" _God Save the King,_ " came out in the voice of an American woman, with an accent he did not immediately recognize. " _Vive la France, and God Bless America. It's just now two o'clock...and welcome, to the Nightwatch._ " He slid the appropriate lever over to skip ahead in the programme, past some of the interstitial music. And he hit on it, nestled in her speech just before her recap of BBC news, the coded words that had been heard over the airwaves and recorded onto this tape that had notified them of Unit 1192's re-appearance on the grid after more than six months thought lost to the merciless sea.

He slid the lever again to come to a second airing by the rolling counter, including the same coded words, meticulously repeated in exactly the same way, this time followed by code indicating the unit's base of operations as being the wholly agricultural Island of Sark.

Stoker smiled to himself at the heartening news, letting the music she announced play on without immediately fast-forwarding through it. " _There'll be bluebirds over, the white cliffs of Dover/Tomorrow, just you wait and see./There'll be love and laughter, and peace ever-after/Tomorrow, when the world is free..._ "

Shortly after, the tape ran out, the fragile strip of recording flapping about on the opposite reel. He removed the rewound reel back to his envelope, straightened the screening room and gathered his things, giving the room one final sweep to make certain he had all the sensitive information handed to him for the upcoming Operation Pellinore, which he was meant to head, before stepping into the hallway.

Almost immediately he ran his lowered head into someone's chest, which was not unusual, the halls here teeming with people, each at their own version of very important business. "Sorry, I say," he began, pleased that he had managed to hold tightly to his folders and Channel Islands Occupation paraphernalia. It would never do to spill sensitive intelligence about an active operation all over the busy corridor, eyes of passers-by everywhere.

"Stoke, Old Man!" he heard in a rich, humorous voice that could belong to no one but Clem Nighten, fellow SIS'er.

"Clem!" he chuckled. "You rotter!"

"How long've you been ashore?"

"Not very. Long enough to kiss Evelyn and the boys. Then, straight here. How's the lovely Mrs. Nighten? Still the blushing bride?"

Clem laughed, charmed to unexpectedly encounter his brother-in-law, so recently back from the Italian Front. "The former Miss Claire Stoker is as generous and as beautiful as the day we married. But you must recall, Stoke, the wedding was summer of '42. It's been more than a year, now. No longer newlyweds and blushing brides."

"Right," he shook his head lightly. "Certainly, of course." He slapped his hand to the files clutched to his side. "Digesting all of this at the rate they want...makes personal information take a backseat sometimes, don't you find?"

"Ah," mock-sighed Nighten, "the trials of the field operative, Old Man. We desk jockeys never worry. We always have a file on hand to consult. Or an aide on hand to bring us one. No abrupt night-wakings with Jerries trying to interrogate us, dicey border crossings, illicit affairs where you pray you don't talk in your sleep..."

Stoker smirked at Clem's diminution of his own importance here, dubbing himself naught but a desk jockey, when such a statement couldn't be further from the truth. "Ah, but you make it all sound of such romance...How is everyone? Your mother is well?"

Nighten robustly grunted his agreement.

"Your father, also?"

Clem's air of joviality instantly evaporated. "We hear nothing," he said. "Not of Sir Edward, nor of my sister, who had traveled to join him in his convalescence prior to..."

"Sorry! So sorry, Old Chap, spoke before I thought." Had he not been reviewing his files (of which, it seemed, Clem, even at his level of security clearance, was ignorant), if he had not been studying so narrowly for the past two days on the Channel Islands, he felt sure he never would have asked after Lord Nighten.

Despite Roger's apology, Clem went on. "There is only the full recant published in Jerry-circulated propaganda of his monograph. It is all we have to go on."

In the ongoing flurry of activity about them in the corridor, their stopping in place was getting them jostled about quite a bit. Stoker moved them subtly closer to the wall. "But surely," he tried to offer some comfort to his brother-in-law, "you must know that to be Reich-engineered."

Clem shrugged. "By most it is expected to have been so, him being such an important propaganda plum for them-can you think of another in the House of Lords they would rather have had to turn? Can you? But the syntax, the idiom-the whole of the recant, it is so essentially... _him_. _If_ it were Reich-engineered, it was...a masterstroke of imitation." His voice dropped lower, making it hard to hear in the active passageway. "I was allowed a few moments alone with a Jerry we pinched off Les Casquets. One of the seven lightkeepers there, taken last year. When I asked about them, he...he said that he _knew_ of Marion. That she was to marry a Jerry officer. An officer who was already living at our estate, _at Barnsdale_." He took a breath. "I spend nights awake trying to come up with some reason-any reason-that that Jerry might have to lie about such a thing." A moment passed, and Clem raised his head and the volume of his voice. "No, Stoke-don't tell me where you're bound this time. But at least, I will have the pleasure of telling Claire that I have seen her brother, and all is well. It is premature, but it will make a fine early Christmas gift."

Nighten grabbed him in a rough side-hug and with a stout pumping of his hand was gone, only the back of his crisp uniform visible as he expertly navigated the bustling corridor to wherever secret location his own secret meetings and files were being held.

Roger Stoker gripped the Operation Pellinore intel tighter to himself. If he could have only told him where he was bound.

**...TBC...**


	2. USA - Hoboken, NJ

**USA - Hoboken, New Jersey -** Laurence McLellan stutter-stepped his way down the neighborhood sidewalk, the tidy brick two-stories on either side of the well-maintained avenue that separated them distinguished one from another solely by whether or not they had matching second-floor dormers (every other one did).

He was headed to number 832, and he had walked this route often enough to know that if it were after school it would not be long before the neighborhood's children would begin peeking out from nicely-trimmed evergreen hedges and shared backyards to stare and speculate about the Western-Union man's irregular gait, and about a man of his age not being deployed in the war.

'4-F,' he would sometimes hear from them in hushed undertones, knowing in his heart that such a category, such a distinction, was not right, somehow, to be knowledge meant for children, but the war bled over into everything these days, even, it often seemed, the very air one breathed. This crisp October day, the leaves turned and sporadically falling, seemed better meant for roasted peanuts, backyard bonfires and excuses to sit closer to sweethearts, than for the overseas news he felt certain burned within his official Western-Union leather satchel, destined for number 832.

It had been more than a month since he had had cause to deliver there. The two ladies and the girl. The child with whitest hair, like fragile angel hair's spun glass, plaited tightly and efficiently by the older lady, the great-grandmother, and finished off with a topknot bow easily the size of a cabbage.

Little Zara was certainly sweet, even if her wee size in contrast to the enormous hair ribbon often made it seem as though she would capsize under its weight. Not that at age three going-on-four she kept still long enough for such a tumble to occur.

The grandmother, Mrs. Olive Carter, and the great-grandmother received regular wires from his company. Overseas monies from a son, also last name of Carter. Received them quite regularly until only recently. It had still been summer the last time Laurence had had reason to deliver to 832.

He was always invited into the kitchen by the elder lady, Tamara, whose last name was not Carter, and she always insisted he sit a moment for a drink of something she called _compote_. It was a heavily sugared concoction, and though out of politeness he swallowed it down with feigned relish, he often found himself leaving their house after the delivery with his mouth more puckered and his throat more parched than when he went in, far from experiencing the refreshment he pretended at.

Having arrived at 832, the Western-Union courier rang the front door buzzer.

"Good day," the elderly Tamara wished him as she answered the door.

"Good day, Madam," he replied, using the only formal address he knew of, something about her always seeming to require and expect it. "I've a cable for Mrs. Olive Carter."

"Won't you come in?" she asked. "My daughter-in-law is not here at the moment, but you know I am always glad to sign for the wire for her."

"No," he gently corrected her, "it is not a wire of money today. It is a cable. From a military address in London."

"A letter?" A small wrinkle showed at her temple. "That _is_ unusual."

McLellan cast his eyes about behind her for Mrs. Olive Carter.

With an unfamiliar-to-him imperiousness, the elderly lady held out her hand, grandly, as if used to being both in charge and obeyed. "I shall hold this for my daughter-in-law, Mr. McLellan. She will not mind my signing for it."

In response he smiled uneasily. It was not something he was technically supposed to do. This cable was meant for Mrs. Olive Carter, at this address. He was not to leave it with whomever he found at home at this address. He was not to go next door and ask the neighbors to do his job for him. No, all of Western-Union and its grand tradition stood behind him, expecting him to properly execute his duty.

Now, had this cable come from the usual address, and come in the form of a wire of money (as they so often did), he would not have given the matter a second thought. Those wires usually bore the names of both women on them. But _this_ cable, he felt nearly certain, contained rather important information meant specifically for Mrs. Olive Carter. Yet here was the great-grandmother, her hand still extended, expectant, majestic, even. "You will...see that she gets it?"

"Mr. McLellan," the imperiousness of her bearing shifted a little, into one of wounded pride, that he might suspect her of doing anything else with the cable other than delivering it.

Quickly he let go of the cable, laying it in her waiting hand. "Say hi to Zara for me, will you? I'll have her a licorice stick next time I'm by."

The elderly lady smiled. "Zara is napping just now," she said, placidly polite now that she had gotten her way. "She will not even know you have been here."

There was a smile of goodbye, but one that did not engage her eyes, making it more of a dismissal, and then the door shut.

He found himself regretfully wondering as the wood of his right leg beat a tattoo on number 832's concrete porch steps down to the sidewalk if he would, in fact, (as with many of his deliveries, with the war dragging on) ever have reason to return here again.

* * *

Exiled Princess Tamara Lyubov Sergeiovna Komonoff of Imperial Russia waited a moment as the courier McLellan made his way back down the street. It would not do for him to have a change of heart and return to find that she had opened the cable meant for (addressed to) her daughter-in-law, "Mrs. Olive Carter". Tamara snorted. Hysterical, since there was no 'Mr. Carter' for her to be Mrs. of.

She tore into the paper, her blue-veined hands, and arthritic, but still useful, knuckles careful not to rip the contents.

It was as she had suspected. As she had feared: the announcement of Flight Commander Thomas Carter's disappearance in action. It offered no further information, only assured them they would be notified upon any change of his status.

_Alexsei-missing_. She took the paper and immediately put it to her breast. Moved to the stove to take down a match and the cast-iron skillet. Things that until some years ago her graceful hands would never have touched, kept in rooms of her palace or country home she would rarely have entered.

She placed the torn Western-Union envelope addressed to "Mrs. Olive Carter" within the well-used skillet and set it afire, in short order turning the paper into unremarkable ash.

She could just imagine the scene, were her daughter-in-law to be in receipt of such news:

"I will tell the child," Olive would say, her brain heaping with practicality, with the constant belief that her son would only grow, as had her husband, to (in her mind) betray and abandon her.

" _If_ you tell that child," Tamara would say, "our life here is over."

"What can you mean?" Olive would ask.

"For 26 years, Olga Lena," it would incense her daughter-in-law for her mother-in-law to use her real, Church-christened name, "no matter what you think, you and I have been family. _The only family_ one another has. For long I have not spoken as I might. I think now I was wrong. Wrong not to speak up when you took this ridiculous new name, when you stripped your son of his as well. Wrong not to speak when my grandson, when our Alexsei, left to fight the Soviet with the Finns."

Tamara, often called merely 'Mara' now, when not called 'Babushka', would deliver such a lecture without the expected Russian accent to her speech. As a princess of Imperial Russia, she had been tutored from a young age in many languages, and primarily spoken French at Court, and in her life, until the Spring of 1917, and their flight from their homeland.

" _You_ ," she would tell Olive, "have long believed that I do not like you. That I never have, even from the early days."

"Why would you? I took," (her daughter-in-law would strain to say the once-cherished name), "Igor from you, away from your side."

Tamara would scoff. "In my life, the men I know have longed for two things: women, and war. I did not think I could keep him from you, then, any more than I think we could have kept Alexsei from this war, now. A heart that tends toward passion will find it in the arms of one such vice, if not the other. As women we can only pray that such zealous appetites will not destroy the men we love. The men to whom our hearts belong."

"My son is dead," Olive would say, taking the cable to its, perhaps, logical end.

"Your son is missing. It is _not_ the same thing," and here Tamara would marshal all the authority a woman whose father had carried fourth rank, receiving the personal attention and friendship of two Tsars, might summon, a woman who now settled for being addressed as, 'Ma'am', but who would not forget her Divinely appointed right to be designated, 'your high nobility' when being spoken to. "Olga Elena Petrovna. For years you poisoned your son's heart. It may be only this war will draw the poison from him. He is missing, not lost. Not dead. I will NOT allow you to 'bury' him as you did his father-MY son. Who may yet live. Who is only missing, never lost. And until," Tamara shook with the imagining of her fictional confrontation with Olive, "such a day as Alexsei's body is brought to us, and the child may meet her father in the flesh, you will NOT tell her this news. Or I will take myself, the child, and my money (no, I have not forgotten, as you sometimes seem to have, that it is _my_ international accounts and investments, and MY jewels upon which we live-as you left everything with Igor, hoping he could buy his release), and I will leave you here without word."

Tamara was so overcome by her own eloquence in the invented reality, by her no-holds-barred ultimatum, she found she very much needed to sit. Her hand shook slightly as she pulled out a kitchen chair for herself.

Once seated, with the same hand she again opened today's cable, read the blunt news as it was baldly related within. She took her other hand and pulled a rough, now-brown copy of a handwritten letter from the top of her slip, where she wore it day-in, day-out. It was dated 1939. He had been gone a year, searching for war, for a way to fight a country, a people that no longer wanted him, that had rejected him, exiled him from its lands.

Tamara's mouth moved as she recited from memory what the letter had to say. It had come directly to her, and as such was written in Alexsei's exquisitely-learned Cyrillic script. " _Babushka, do not fear to take the child in. She is yours, as she is surely mine, though I did not know it, and if I had would have done right by it. You must love her for me. I do not think I would know how. I will send more, more monies for the care of her, though I do not know what a child might need. If the day comes that you must tell her about me, tell her of ten-year-old Alexsei, who loved to fish, and dreamed of fantastic adventures in his very own hot air balloon. Give her that boy for a father to love. Not Thomas Carter_."

It was the last personal letter anyone at number 832 had received. Shortly thereafter they had received notice Thomas Carter had been captured by the Soviet Army and was classified a prisoner of war.

Olive had initially despaired, and then come to hope that with Finland's Winter War ended, once released he would return home. Instead he had re-enlisted, with the British Royal Air Force this time. He would fly planes for them, still at war. And so the regular wires of money resumed, but no personal letters. Never a word, only the monies.

His was a very Russian story, Tamara thought, her own given name a combination of 'bitterness' and 'love', her grandson's life certainly a narrative performed in a minor key, but one better served in a novel by Count Tolstoy, than by one having to live it.

She folded the new cable into the cherished letter, and replaced both into her slip's neckline, satisfied Olive would be none-the-wiser. And she went to wake Zara from her nap, the day, the week, the year set to progress as though the cable, its contents unshared, its envelope destroyed, any confrontation over it entirely imaginary, had not arrived at all.

_Missing. Not lost_.

**...TBC...**


	3. Rural Scotland and news from Kirk Leaves

**Rural Scotland -** Louise La Salle took in a rare moment indoors, away from her work and field chores in the WLA, the Women's Land Army, where she helped on a local farm raising food and tending animals to meet the growing British need for provisions among both the military and the general population.

Her hands moved deftly at her needlework, content with the activity of their appointed chore. She smelled the familiar supper-makings coming from the kitchen, finding herself wishing they were close enough to the sea (they were not) to enjoy fresh fish.

When she had left Sark she certainly had never dreamed that being evacuated from there would keep her away from the island as long as it already had, much less that she would be able to so easily find work in Britain, and war work at that. Though, certainly, the biggest surprise of all had been that of Little Stephen, who, unbeknownst to her at the time, had also evacuated Sark with her, a tiny, barely conceived stowaway within her (in-the-past, unreliable) womb.

But here he was playing on the floor at her feet while she saw to the farmer and his wife's mending, a strong, chubby lad of two-and-a-half, with his father's russet-to-ginger hair, a decided Scottish accent already creeping into his ever-growing vocabulary. Sometimes her Norman-accustomed ears actually had to consult the farmer's elderly wife who watched over the child during the day, as to what Little Stephen was trying to say.

Of course, no true need for the 'Little' distinction, his father Stephen being miles upon miles away, entirely ignorant of his toddler son's existence.

Louise thought of what she might give, might trade to be able to send Stephen news. _Two sentences. No, one sentence_. She _had_ written, as was custom, through the Red Cross, prayed for her letters' delivery, but though they had not come back marked undeliverable, as she heard nothing in reply of them she felt certain they had not been received, the community of Sark being of such a caliber that she knew had anything happened to Stephen a neighbor would have accepted her letter and replied to her in his stead. At the least, Dick Giddons would have posted her a Red Cross-couriered reply.

Since Stephen's sight had gone fully-dark they two had never had an occasion for exchanging letters between them. He _could_ write, some small amount. His letters proved clumsier in their formation than when his vision had been good. Even so, they were legible. But since their marriage the La Salles had never experienced separation of any kind that would have caused them to depend upon written correspondence.

No, Louise changed her mind. She would not bargain for the ability to get news _to_ him. She would be selfish. It was news _from_ him that she so desperately craved.

He had to be able to assume that having arrived in Britain she was well and good. She, on the other hand, had no such assurances about his welfare in the wake of Occupation.

Had it not been for the unexpected appearance of Little Stephen she would have spent all her nights in Scotland re-examining her agreeing with Stephen that she must evacuate. As it was, even with Little Stephen she often fought with herself when the lights went out: even if things were bad on Sark, did she not best belong where her heart also did? Did a son not need a father more than the safety and protection strangers might provide him? Might they three not have been safe enough on the farm? On Sark? Keeping their heads down, enduring through this war, but as a family, rather than suffering all this; years of separation and precious time lost over the Jewish ancestry of a grandmother best-remembered (if remembered at all) by a framed needlepoint hanging in the entryway of the La Salle farmhouse? Her beloved house, her and Stephen's house so far away, their home from which she received no news?

She looked down to the sock she was darning. It was the farmer's. She did not want to be at mending another man's clothes. Nor did she want, as she would do after the evening meal, to be knitting sweaters and sundries for strangers, with Scottish wool. She wanted Sarkese wool on her needles and in her purls. She wanted the day's catch on her own kitchen table, and Serquiaise words in Little Stephen's mouth.

Louise caught herself before the momentary bitterness spilled over into her expression. " _Oh, Lord_ ," she prayed, twisting at the slender golden circlet on her left hand, " _do not let me scorn the blessings of our safety here. But, oh Lord, do, please do, let him send word_."

* * *

**ENGLAND - Kirk Leaves, the Country Estate of Earl Huntingdon -** Wadlow the butler must surely have been nearly apoplectic upon hearing the news. Downstairs, anyway, his shock must have been apparent, whether he chose to register surprise Upstairs or not: The Earl to entertain _two_ women, on _two_ separate occasions within less than a single week of one another? The house had doubtless been thrown into upheaval.

The Earl, after all, did _not_ entertain. Certainly not since the viscount, Master Robin's death. Nor did he generally receive visitors. Were it necessary to make a call he did so, calling in at the house of those with whom he needed to visit.

The staff and manor of Kirk Leaves had simply gotten out of the habit of a social lifestyle. The Earl traveled to London regularly on business, but gone were the trips to France, or other trips to the Continent on business-or pleasure. Gone were the country house parties thrown by the young master, his weekend visitors brought in wishing to hunt or shoot. Gone were the worries of how to plan for possibly unevenly matched numbers of men to ladies, gone were the logistical problems of how to modestly house the single ladies away from the men's bedrooms. And generally gone was the permanent gaiety of the young master when in residence, and the staff's held-breath anticipation of it.

Kirk Leaves was still a well-oiled machine, but an ever-increasing automaton, a house less alive, less lived-in, now more muted, entire wings closed up from lack of use.

Yet the Earl carried on, much, to many observers, as he had before. But, to keener observers (though there were not many), his life had lost something of surprise, of curiosity, of...possibility. He lived as a widower with no children...who was his age plus twenty years more. A man who had come to be defined among the public (possibly, even in his own mind) by the relationships he had lost to death's hand, rather than by the relationships he sought to cultivate among the living.

All-in-all, most anyone would remark, he was on the whole entirely as he had been before his son's reported death. Steadfast. Nothing about Huntingdon had changed; his thoughts and views proved constant, his emotions steady, his personality pleasant and agreeable. It was only that the forces of life, of _joie de vivre_ , the possibility of the unexpected...it was only that the seed of the spontaneous-against which he might have railed at the time-had abandoned him, and encountered him, and he it, no longer ever at all.

Nor did he seem to note such as being true.

And so it was as Wadlowe had told the housekeeper; two ladies to two separate teas within a fortnight of one another? A comparative marathon of Society.

* * *

Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, sat in the conservatory as he awaited the lady for the second tea, reflecting on the room about him, built for his wife, but cobbled onto the country home rather gracelessly, conservatories not having been _en vogue_ at the time the manor's original sturdy architecture had been the order of the day. And so it was an uneasy marriage of forms.

Kirk Leaves was a man's house, with the fragile glass and metal fittings, the filigree and hothouse flowers of a conservatory wedded to its bulk awkwardly at best.

As he contemplated the delicate, perfectly appointed table set nearby him, the one that would hold the coming tea service when his guest arrived, he found his mind circling back to the other tea guest he had hosted several days before.

He had not encountered Lady Nighten for nearly two years, their social circles being so vastly different, hers moving like a whirligig, his more like sludge on a waterwheel, and women not being permitted entry at his club, his primary social outlet.

He was never certain if the years had been kind to Lady Nighten, who was neither as old as him, nor as her one-time husband, Sir Edward. Never certain of inherent kindness in the passage of time toward her, or if she, herself, had certain powers, cream, therapies and such, to combat them. Either way she looked better than most females who were staying in London to endure the Blitz.

But then, she had always been a head-turner, from the moment she had first been presented at Court. And how the tongues had wagged when she had accepted Edward's offer of marriage. Even in those days, such an age gap was remarkable.

Her hair was still quite dark, like her daughter's, like her son's. Her face, where wrinkles did show, only in the most tasteful spots and amounts.

As they were seated and she was pouring at his request, she spoke. "I have not been to the country in some time, certainly I have seen little of Kirk Leaves these past years." She smiled across to him. "One forgets what lovely grounds you have here."

He noticed she did not ask to what she might owe the honor of a tea invitation. But of course he knew better than to expect such boorish manners from her. "And where do you stay, in London? I sent my note 'round by way of Clem at the Mayfair house."

"Oh, yes," again she smiled, "I am there. Clem's wife is rarely home. I am ensconced somewhat like...a, hmmm...visitor, staying at Clem's wishes, I suppose. I have my old rooms, of course."

"So very little has changed for you?" of course he meant, 'since the divorce'.

She gave a small shrug, bringing her gaze back to him from where she had been admiring some camellias over his shoulder. "It would appear that as long as I wear only the legal badge of divorce, and do not attempt to court a lover or re-marry-as long as I have but one living husband-no one seems to mind, my own family being equal insofar as nobility, my title my own, and not marriage-derived."

Their tones were civil-cordial, even-he could not have said what caused him to speak next. Perhaps too much time among to-the-point conversations at his club. "And so, after all that, it must gall you to read the circulated recant they claim for Edward's, now."

Her eyes stutter-blinked. Other than that she gave away not an ounce of surprise at his very surprising, even his very leading, inquiry. "Does it gall me? No." She let a small wrinkle creep onto her forehead. "But it does beg the question...is he so determined to be reviled by whatever the prevailing winds are that now, when it does no good to anyone, _now_ he recants?"

Well, he had best have it out. There was no going back now. Surely their decades-old acquaintance could handle the fall-out. "Which he would not do for you?"

She lightly scoffed. The Earl and she had never had occasion to discuss the matter. It was unseemly to air one's private matters, thus. No matter that he had nearly been family, that Edward would have thought, have treated, him so even without a marriage between their children. "At the time, to write, to publish in favor of war, in support of the Jewish race? It was society-suicide. Certainly no one else was willing to stick their neck out. The Duke of Windsor, Mr. Lindbergh-they were all visiting Hitler, not biting their thumbs at him."

"You disagreed with the ideals Sir Edward articulated? The meat of the monograph?"

"Don't," she nearly spat (as nearly as a Lady might spit) out the negative, "be ridiculous."

He took a breath. "No. I perhaps know the matter between the two of you too intimately to pretend otherwise, at least from your husband-that is, Sir Edward's-side. And I find myself rarely 'ridiculous'. Might I ask, this 'society' you wished so desperately to please, to refrain from troubling the waters of-is it still so important to you, yet?"

Her tone became somewhat hardened. "It is all the domain afforded me." Her eyes narrowed only slightly as they held his. "You will recall, Robert, you were present for the votes those years ago, were you not? You will recall that it was all to which a woman might _legally_ aspire."

"And now," he referenced the monograph's recant, "when the words are revoked, it comes so at a time it does you little good, society-wise. When we are called to bang the drum, to buy our war bonds, salvage our rubber, plant our victory gardens, and thumb our nose at Herr Hitler." He looked at her, she looked at him. He felt the topic was past pursuing any further. "Do you hear anything?"

There was a wariness now to her. It was obvious she did now wonder why she had been asked to tea, she no longer troubled to conceal her suspicious curiosity. "Nothing. Silent as the cable severed between the Islands and London." Still, she could find nothing improper or even uncharitable in his questions. Her tone softened. "I think sometimes Clem may know something, have some news from the work he is in, but he shares none of it. Their names are never mentioned around the house, even, as though speaking them might call down their yet un-risen ghosts." She paused, recalling with whom she spoke. "But of course you will know something worse of that, yourself."

"Miranda," the Earl began, "I cannot lie. I would much rather have Sir Edward here for what I am about to say, and, if not, in his stead, Marion, who has always known his mind as well as anyone, if not better, I should think. As I cannot have either, I come to you. I am in an awkward position these last years, and I find I must make a decision about the whole of my estate. The title, of course, will revert to the Crown to re-dispensate upon my death, but the rest, the houses and monies, are mine to bestow as I please. I thought you might do me the honor of stepping for a moment into Edward's shoes, into his mind, and speaking with me about,-discussing with me as he might-the possible candidates."

She was flattered, but her mind instantly reverted to other possibilities. "Robert," her voice was close to tender, as she spoke to an old friend. "You are not so infirm," she paused before saying the rest, not accustomed to sharing such remarks with a gentleman, "nor yet so physically displeasing as to despair of ever producing another blood heir."

He shook his head. "I will not wed again. Let that avenue be closed for discussion."

There was a pause as Lady Nighten considered his resolve in the matter. "She might have had a son," she said, referring not at all to a wife the present Earl might take. "The women in my family have always been very reliable about producing fine sons." And she found she could not quite get back her voice, unshaken. She widened her eyes in hopes to allow the water pooling there more room to settle and disappear without spilling over onto her cheek.

"Now _that_ ," he warned her, though she knew better than chasing that melancholy line of thought, "we must neither of us speak on further," and so as a pair they had thrown themselves with some gusto into both the teacakes, and briskly debating the available options (his first cousins, second cousins, his wife's distant family) for settling his fortune and property.

* * *

"My lord," Wadlow announced, and the Earl was popped out of his reverie by the arrival of Lady Sophie Miller, sister of Lord Bonchurch, mother of Mitch, nephew and once heir to Bonchurch.

"Lord Robert," she bustled and beamed, not as much meat to her as one tended to get the impression of. She was so fidgety and full of bustle, seeming to be everywhere at once, when she had departed one always bore the feeling that she had been larger than life-size, grander and somewhat bulkier.

But though she had a weakness for far-too-large hats, it was simply not the case. Lady Sophie was actually quite trim in her never-given-up corset, very little over-plumpness about her.

They had barely gotten through the expected pleasantries when she surged forward with the reason for their meeting together.

"I brought these," she said, reaching for an artist's portfolio that Wadlow was holding for her, "just so you might see the renderings." She slapped the portfolio shut for a moment, having withdrawn nothing yet. Her eyes grew round. "They are very moving, I must warn you. Myself, I cried over them copiously for several days before I could look at them dry-eyed."

The Earl had not forgotten Lady Sophie's being so terribly incommoded at the funeral, and in the ensuing weeks. "And these are meant as studies for..."

"A statue, I think," she answered, brightly. "Of them together as boys. Tastefully done. Certainly not in the modern style."

"No, I should say," he indulged her with his agreement, as he had in inviting her to tea. He had considerable admiration for Lady Sophie, for all her impractical, unintentionally whimsical ways. "More, you are thinking, along the lines of Nelson's, in Trafalgar?"

A crisp nod of approval. "Just so. And at its base, them grown. Bas-reliefs in bronze. The profiles, I think. Possibly, a locally-penned poem. We might ask the local paper to run a request for entries." Her eyes took on a shine with a new idea. "We could advertise in the _Times_!"

Here, the Earl saw that he would have to put a stopper on her fun, obviously set to spiral further out-of-control. "Might I ask, Lady Sophie, whether it might be best to, perhaps, take the sculpture (not in the modern style), and the very elegant bronze plaques, and... _convert them_ , if you will, into simply and respectfully listing the names, and perhaps the towns of _all the six_?" He saw her face about to fall. "'Twould be less grand a memorial, certainly, but 'twould better serve the posterity you are so admirably desirous of commemorating Mitch to, would it not? To list him and his fellows? Heroes all, I am told."

She looked uncertain. "Well, I am sure they were, to a man, my lord. But one of them I am told was from Leeds. Some dreadful place called Quarry Hill... _Leeds_! Another was a Scottish miner. Ought we list such dubious origins next to our own, beloved sons?"

Robert, Lord Huntingdon, who had belly-laughed infrequently when his son was alive, and little if ever since his death, found he could not help but chuckle.

* * *

**Channel Island of Alderney - Treeton Camp -** Mitch Bonchurch, rightful heir to his maternal uncle's estate and title (though his third cousin at the present moment took such to be his own, now inherited, dominion) would have scoffed not a moment at any Leeds-man or former mineworker who might appear to affect his rescue from his present situation.

Although, actually, his present situation was far from understood, even by himself. He had been taken into custody by Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer this morning at the Sark harbour of Creux, but nearly, it seemed in retrospection, as an afterthought by the German.

Along with Lady Marion he had been set on a boat bound for Alderney. (Her somewhat more comfortably so, on a stretcher.) Less than an hour later they had arrived on the island, and the Lieutenant had not even lingered to see him placed in a cell, much less to question him.

With considerable agitation he paced the small area of the holding cell he had been consigned to, its location near the front of the camp; wondering, wishing, fearing, what might come next.

**...TBC...**


	4. Island of Jersery - Cabaret Freesia

**Channel Island of Jersey - _Cabaret Freesia -_** It had been a private party, much as it was of any night, of any hour, anymore. German officers only. _Certain_ select German officers only, when OberAdmiral Jan Prinzer was ashore. As the highest-ranking German official sporadically _en residence_ where the Channel Islands were concerned, anything growing, living, breathing or built on the Islands was automatically at his command. And so it was that on his favorite island, his favorite cabaret also housed his favorite girls, his favorite china, stewed his favorite hasenpfeffer, and served his favorite officers and favorite wines.

Small lamps discreetly lit individual tables, and much effort had gone in the past years into making the space appear to have more in common with fashionable Berlin than the rather more pedestrian St. Helier, in which it was located. Pre-war nightlife here had been of a more provincial kind; cafes open late, bare hanging bulbs to light the sidewalks and tables surrounding them, dancing near the water...other, more rural, less sophisticated, pleasures. Of course, now, all gone, with the enforced curfew. It was said some Islanders had taken to going to bed as early as five.

It had been no small matter to receive an invitation to Cabaret Freesia. With unresolved disorder at the Treeton Camp, Alderney's Island Kommandant Vaiser would not have kept faith with the summons of anyone but the OberAdmiral. If only those left in charge, particularly Gisbonnhoffer with the help of Diefortner, could manage things for a few hours until his return, he could seize the opportunity and ensure such a party might prove the further making of him.

 _Clever,_ thought Kommandant Vaiser to himself, _that driver of mine, to suggest bringing a sack of Alderney hares with me for the kitchens_. He had not been aware Prinzer's taste for rabbit was so well-known among the ranks that even one as unremarkable as his Islander driver might have caught on. More like something Underlieutenant Diefortner might come up with, really.

Well, the gift of the meat had been more than well-received, and had further greased the already coveted invitation he had won over the other Island Kommandants. After all, did he not sit now at Prinzer's own table, the rest of which was populated entirely by women? _It was nice. It was warm. It was...supple...here among them, not smelly and starved like the free Islander women he encountered of the Guernsey bailiwick._

It would seem during this Occupation if you wanted a woman (one that wouldn't gag you at the sight of her leprous appearance) the onus was on you to supply her with the things she would need as far as grooming. Silk stockings brought from mainland France, certainly. Scent, naturally. Cosmetics, jewelry when you could confiscate it (his position was very advantageous for this). Yet even basic soap and detergent had to be added to the list. And potatoes, some beef every once and again, chocolates and pastry if you wanted her to keep her curves so that you might have something to hang onto of a night other than bones, than the pervasive pallid flesh that had begun to infest the islands in this nearly-fourth year of the Occupation.

Prinzer smiled companionably across from him and bid one of the women to offer Vaiser a smoke. Four _zigaretten_ instantly appeared in front of the Kommandant's face, each held within perfectly manicured and polished nails with fingertips showing not a trace of distasteful callus.

The show was to begin shortly. Things were already being brought out to set the modest cabaret stage, to which they had the best seats.

"You will enjoy this," Prinzer told him, confidently.

Vaiser did not quibble. He was enjoying himself quite well just as he was. But he meant to take the foreshadowing comment of his superior as an order. Yes. He _would_ enjoy this. Whatever it was.

The top bill proved to belong to a man called 'Joss Tyr', his face heavily made-up in sequins and paint, Harlequinesque, giving him an eerie but eye-catching appeal, and an unexpected sparkle under the dark lights of the cabaret.

Before the performance fully hit its stride, Prinzer leaned across the table, rhetorically asking, "he is good, no?"

Vaiser offered the expected effusive compliments, as it was obvious the entertainer was a favorite of the OberAdmiral. "What's his story, then? Not an Islander, doesn't seem."

"No," Prinzer confirmed, shifting a girl on his lap so that he might switch to the seat next to Vaiser. "'Joss Tyr' is only his stage name. He is Werner von Himmel. He was overseeing some Todt workers on the beaches, the placement of mines. Very tiresome duty for an officer, when one idiot worker mis-stepped. The worker? Little more than grit in sand. Von Himmel? He moves too well to hardly show it, but he lost any good fingers on his hands. He was facially scarred and can no longer fire a gun." He tch'ed. "Worthless to the Reich. He recuperated from his injuries here, and asked leave to stay on, which I granted. His act used to consist of illusions, but the wooden prosthetics he wears now under his gloves prevent true sleight-of-hand. Instead, he claims the explosion has gifted him with second sight." Prinzer chuckled. It was unclear whether he believed this assertion. "He is my fool, and performs at my whim. I shall have him read you."

Before Vaiser could protest (not that one protested against an OberAdmiral), but not before he could find himself stricken with some degree of worry-what if the gift were truth? There were plenteous things related to his position, and plenty not, that he _certainly_ did not need to have aired publicly. Instead, he exclaimed, "Charming!" and worked hard to look as though he meant it.

Joss Tyr approached Prinzer's table at the OberAdmiral's subtle beckon. Without asking, he went directly to Vaiser, holding the Kommandant's studied, steady gaze in his own glassy, exaggerated stage expression. The sequins catching the light and throwing it back made it hard to maintain looking at him.

"Number one," Tyr said, dramatically, for all to see, raising his thumb to count on. "By week's end, _you_ will become a father!"

The audience hooted and howled. Several officers shouted their congratulations. Vaiser strained against his own eyes, which wanted to roll at the ridiculous announcement.

"Two," said Tyr, his tone as loud and punctuated as a signal bell being rung in a tower, "The compatriot of your enemy is your enemy. The mate of your enemy is your enemy. And yet," he smirked, continuing on with a jokey tone. "Your enemy has neither."

Vaiser harrumphed to himself. "Then I am singularly lucky," he mumbled under his breath, still smiling at the performance.

"Three," and the audience re-quieted. "The Watchman will rise." Joss Tyr paused for effect. " _And_. The Watchman will rise." His face stretched into a clown-like grin of insensible delight.

Vaiser felt, more than saw, Prinzer react to this foretelling. They had only just put the Nightwatch to rest. Put her down like a rabid dog; hunted and shot. Were _he_ in charge here, this cabaret act, this _fool_ , would be headed for Jersey's prison. Clearly the man knew something-or, just as bad, _hoped_ for something. Former German officer or no. Vaiser had seen crippling injuries turn men against the Fatherland before.

Prinzer's fool crowed at the silent-as-a-gasp reaction to his tertiary soothsaying. "And, fourth," he spoke, "and finally, listen well." He shook his head, the sequin reflections twinkling on his face like coins catching the sun in the bottom of a fountain. "I don't like to repeat myself." He spoke slowly. Cassandra could have rendered it no better. "At midnight, on the day the counter-blowing wind does no good, the sun's fire will consume the messenger."

Something in his doom-saying voice rubbed the Kommandant once-and-finally the wrong way. "Piffle," Vaiser scoffed, irritated, looking for the first time to those about him, their expressions. "This man has had too many schnapps."

He felt the unwelcome stiff awkwardness of the man's carved wooden grip on his arm.

"Later, recall," the fool was saying, "I don't like to repeat myself."

And in a hail of applause and shouts of congratulation by Prinzer and his closest officers, an acrid column of smoke appeared, and 'Joss Tyr', this Werner von Himmel that was, was in evidence no more.

* * *

**Channel Island of Sark - Farm of Blind La Salle -** "John, what d'ye reckon?" Richard Royston asked his mate in the farmhouse kitchen, "we've no proper sapper, but with your time in the mines, if we got me some good boom, might we build ourselves a snug little nest among the shafts and the unstruck silver on Little Sark?"

Iain Johnson held his mug at table level, surrounding it with both his large hands, like Royston hoping to use the weak coffee's warmth to unchill his hands from where he'd been digging just beyond the yard. "We'd do better first to find someone who knows something of their layout. Before we set Dale to scrounge you some good boom."

"Go on, now," Royston replied, his voice, as usual, never restrained.

John looked to the door to the hallway and the rest of the house, some part of which held Stephen and Robin. His eyes slanted toward the front parlor, which still held Dick, laid out, a funeral to occur in the late afternoon of the day, before evening chores. He doubted Robin had wandered in there.

He and Royston had not seen their commanding officer since morning, when Mitch had left with Lady Marion. John did not doubt Oxley was trying to resolve the ugly wrestling match within himself from where Lady Marion had somehow manipulated him into agreeing to let Mitch escort her to, and hand her over, at the German Garrison. Which John and Royston had both heartily agreed between themselves was a much better idea. Only, Johnson had no idea how she had pulled it off. Robin had not appeared to them again to offer any clue. Doubtless, he was in a dark mood of high gloom.

Their work of the morning had been a grim one: digging Dick's grave. They had been nearly done when they had agreed to return indoors to a warm drink and trying to regain feeling in their fingers. That had been some twenty minutes ago, as Royston had quickly embarked on the discussion of planning for a new hideout, delaying their return to the growing hole and pile of dirt.

Behind Royston the barnyard door creaked open to reveal Robin, not at all inside. His face, arms, and legs showed the exact nature of his absence. He had been at finishing the digging for them, his spade left out-of-doors.

"You idiot wallydraigle!" John jumped up from where he sat, drawing Oxley to a bench alongside the table, as always when he was irritated, his Scots showing.

"Now, John," Oxley mildly protested, "you know an Oxford man cannot understand you when you start to carry on like some painted-blue Celt."

"Robin," John began to scold him, one of his strong arms seeing to it that Robin sat in place. " _Sir_ ," his 'r' rolled with the emphasis on the term of respect, "I have told you, as your medic, you canna overextend yourself, or these muscles, if you wish this cut to heal."

Royston had moved to keep a watch at the window, as John beginning his medical ministrations would make it hard for them to scatter were anyone unexpected to appear. "Grave-diggin's hard on the back."

"Yes," agreed Robin, hissing as Johnson found the stitched spot in question, where an unexpected night spent in a barn stall, and over-working an injured muscle spading out a grave had inflamed the wound. He breathed a little heavily at John's probing inspection, but managed to get out, "Marion has little praise for your stitching, you know."

At the window, Royston's eyebrows raised at the notion that Lady Marion had had the chance to examine Oxley's bare back.

"Aye? Well, she'll have to find elsewhere on ye to look, for perfection," Johnson declared, "as I canna take them out yet, though I had hoped to. This inflammation is but next-door to infection. Did ye not know ye were allergic to hay?"

"Oh, Lor'," Robin moaned, priorly clueless as to any allergies. "Don't tell Marion. She'll have naught to do with a man who won't frequent a barn!"

Royston crossed his arms. "And how's the son of a lord to know he's got hay allergy?" Royston asked, curiously. "Not like he's out mowing the fields, is it?"

John looked a grim reply at Royston's turned back. At least Oxley was speaking about Marion without losing his cool, even if he was, perhaps, not on speaking terms _with_ her at present.

"Here comes Wills, and the others," Royston announced.

The noises of the three returned from Ruffords could be heard as they traversed the nearby barnyard.

"What?" John cried, "And did you just now see them? Nice, that, for a sentry."

"Naw," Royston scoffed. "'Tis only Wills. Seemed pointless to interrupt yer physic just to mention Wills had come back."

John scoffed back. "Remind me of that next time you don't wish to interrupt our tea on account of some Jerries hiding in the rain barrel."

Royston made a dismissive noise out of the side of his mouth, but it was not an angry one, nor was Johnson's barb meant to greatly sting, and certainly not to provoke.

Johnson went back to work cleaning, as best he could, the area surrounding Robin's stitches, using what supplies he could find in his precious medic's bag.

So they all were; Royston at the window, Robin shirtless, laid belly-down upon the cleared trestle table at John's request, and John bent over his commanding officer's back, at work, when Wills, Carter and the Gypsy boy Djak entered La Salle's kitchen.

"I had not thought to see you three," Robin's lifted himself up on his elbows, his gaze lingered longer on the flier, "back quite so soon."

Wills gave a grim smile in reply. "Ruffords will not have the boy," he indicated Djak.

"And why not?" John asked, his head nearly colliding with the hanging kerosene lamp as he straightened himself.

"So the airman could not have stayed behind?" Robin found he liked it better if he did not use the man's name.

"Well," Wills reminded him, "without Car-" he saw the look, and like Mitch before him made allowances, " _him_ , we cannot be understood by, nor understand, the boy."

"Thought yer orders were to work on that, make him like yer liver, or summat." Royston teased, his smirk showing only in its reflection on the glass.

Wills' speech got quicker as he rose to the defense of himself, though the comments had been made in jest. "Yes, well, Abby won't have him. He takes things what aren't his."

Robin and John looked at the young boy, slight frowns of concern creasing their brows at this new development.

"Such as?" John asked.

"Cutlery; a table knife," Wills began the list, his face a bit red at the length of it. "A small ball of twine, four marbles belonging to Abby's boys...and a silk headscarf."

"Bless me," John cut in, referencing the boy's verging-on threadbare clothing. "Wherever did he put it all?"

From where he stood beside Djak, Carter began to speak. "I should've-"

Robin's eyes slid sharply over to him, and at their eye-contact, he cut himself off.

Wills continued, though he hated to do it. "And he has lice."

Defeated exhales could be heard throughout the room.

"Will we never be rid of it?" Robin asked the question on all their minds.

"I will see to the necessary remedy," came the voice of Stephen La Salle from the hall as he came into his kitchen. "After you all, to a man, have washed down with it (and I will as well), he may stay here. Mr. Carter," he seemed the only one not loathe to say the name in Robin's presence. "Tell the boy he is to hide here on my tenement. Tell him also that we live communally here, what is mine is his. He may take or rearrange whatever to his liking."

Robin protested. "Stephen, we cannot expect you to take on Wills and...the flier," his voice lowered to that of gritted tooth, " _as long as he may be with us_ , as well. Three is too many to easily hide day-in and day-out, or explain away."

"True. Three is a houseful," Stephen agreed. "But I find I would rather be crowded than lonely. And challenged rather than sidelined."

Robin did not immediately respond. His first thought was that it was far too much to have Stephen take in the very man that had killed Dick. His second was that, though skin color meant nothing to a blind man, hiding the Gypsy in plain sight would birth its own set of obstacles to overcome.

"Allen, coming in," Royston reported from his window post.

"Oh," answered John, pretending at snotty, "and thank _you_ , Mr. Royston, for interrupting us with _that_ , as Wills' and the boy's," deliberately he added, "and Carter's fate hangs in the balance."

"Ought he not be well away, off to Alderney and his driving?" asked Wills, looking to the kitchen clock with concern.

"Something is not right," declared Robin, raising himself nimbly off his belly and leaving the make-shift exam table. He grabbed his shirt, the shirt Marion had grasped in her fists as she slept in his arms only some hours ago, pulling it savagely over his head, and stomped out to the barnyard to meet Dale before he had come all the way to the house.

**...TBC...**


	5. Marion to Alderney FB Tea at Claridge's

**Alderney -** Marion could hear men's (soldier's) voices outside the Harbormaster's office, shouting about the Kommandant's driver, wondering where he was, as the Kommandant was shortly to be coming ashore, returned from a brief time spent on Jersey.

She stood behind a brought-in medical screen of gathered white fabric on a metal frame, meant to grant her some privacy while the German's best doctor on the Islands had examined and tended to her. Stitches in her scalp and on her cheek. Cleaning and binding her feet, her wrists. Salve for her mouth. Nothing, of course, could be done for her hair. She found herself thinking about Robin's Sarkese rector, La Salle, hoping that they were able to get him to the doctor on that island to have his ears properly looked after.

His ears, which were Geis' doing. Geis, who had no trouble mixing a brutal search for an escaped prisoner with trying to find someone to officiate at his wedding. _Her_ wedding. _Their_ wedding.

It had proven harder than she had expected, knowing what evil he had sown on Sark, and yet letting him touch her, carry her, even. He had not kissed her. She must truly look bad. She had not located a mirror in the La Salle farmhouse to examine herself in, she had had only Robin's and Mitch's eyes in which to see her reflection. Robin's...no, she must not think along those lines. Mitch's...Mitch, who was heaven-only-knew-where. She came close to stamping her feet in frustration before recalling their injury. Allen Dale had better bloody well show up for work and get to it, and start doing whatever it was he did, and find out where they had Mitch. Even still they were going on about him, about Allen, speculating on his whereabouts, outside.

She heard a hand to the door, and from where she sat obediently behind the screen she knew it was Geis.

His voice was calm, soft, and entirely out of place in this martial setting. "Marion?"

"I am not...decent," she announced to warn him away, lying.

He held his position at the door. "I have spoken to the doctor. He said I may...that I may see you." He stalled for a moment, realizing the inappropriate way that might sound, taken at face value: ' _I might see you, when you are not decent_ '. He tried again. "That is, that you may see visitors."

She remained seated so that she was not visible over the screen. She made no move to pretend at dressing (she already was), nor did she speak.

"If it is your hair, my darling...You have never...when I saw you being returned by that fisherman..."

She cut into Geis' halting attempt at sharing his emotions with her. "Where have you taken him?"

"Who?" He had not caught up, his mind still mired in how to express himself to her.

"The fisherman. He was just a simple man. He helped me. You're not going to keep him long, are you?"

"Him?" Her interest in the man who affected her rescue was understandable, but he had no use for fishermen in this moment. "Don't think of him. I am sure he will be rewarded for his part in your rescue."

But she persisted. "Will you interrogate him?"

His brow wrinkled and he shook his head to clear it. "What?"

Sounding close to defiant, but also hesitant, she asked, "Will you interrogate me?"

He did not answer her, instead she heard him moving across the floor, his boots and parts of his uniform making noise in the otherwise empty room. He did not have to step around the screen. He was easily tall enough to see over it, and find her there, dressed in some clothing that had been provided (she did not wish to reflect on where it had come from, from whom it had been stolen, or whether its owner was still alive). It did not fit very well, but it proved clean and little-worn.

Her feet could not yet fit in any shoes. A matron (from one of the camps, she assumed) had presented her with a pair of men's slippers, medium-large to accommodate the bandages. She had yet to put them on.

She smelled of medical pasting and alcohol, iodine, and bandages. And when she looked up at him, over the screen, perhaps he could see something in her eyes of the uncertainness she felt in his presence now, following her intimate knowledge of the encounter he had forced at La Salle's farm. Perhaps he could see as her newly wary eyes registered the sound memory that rang in her ears, " _You have not seen him, then, enjoying his work at the camps_."

The look she gave him from where she sat, behind the screen, took his breath away. There was something about it entirely unfamiliar, but deeply stirring, though he could not understand what that something was-that it was unvarnished emotion-that it was truth, with which she so rarely gifted him.

He grabbed the screen, which was on wheels, and sent it rolling into the wall. He did not break eye contact with her. He did not want to lose the moment. He stepped to her and gathered her as gently into his arms as he knew how to do, taking breath only when he felt her, finally, at last, un-tense and accept his strength, his embrace, about her. "I will let no one hurt you further," he promised, his own heart beat-skipping with the pledge. "You are so precious to me, Marion. These past days have been...I would not allow myself to lose hope that I would find you." He smiled bittersweetly, though she was too close to him to see it. "That you would be...well."

She replied more prickily than he had expected, tension re-coalescing about her. "And so I seem so 'well' to you?"

"The doctor said you would heal. He said that, by your own admission, you suffered no... _intimate_ injury while you were captive."

"And on that account, are you more relieved for _me_? Or for yourself?"

"Why...How can..?" He felt speechless in the wake if her righteous antagonism. This was not at all her melting in his arms, letting him care for her, tend to her as he had envisioned (even, anticipated). He paused for a moment to gather himself. "You are angry with me," he concluded. "That I did not, that I could not, protect you. You take this to mean my feelings for you are not genuine. It was _for_ you that I attempted no violence toward the prisoner. It was _for_ you, for fear of his hurting you, that I did not stand in the way of his escape. In taking no action against him I have gravely put myself, and my position here, at risk. This, I did knowingly for _you_." But he read it in her face. He had failed her, and she blamed him for what had come next. "Certainly I could not expect a man who flies under the British flag to treat a citizen of the Crown, a woman, at that, in such a way." He did not withhold his simmering outrage. Were she not still agreeing to stay in his arms he would be pacing the room. "What he has done to you is inexcusable. It is pitiless, the treatment you have been subjected to, you, a _Lady_ , a _noble_ -the very soul of what he is to defend, to protect! RAF Flight Commander Thomas Carter is lower than a beast. I shall split his guts if ever I see him again."

"You shan't," she said, her voice smaller, less sharp.

"How so?" He had no intention of interrogating Marion, nor letting anyone else. Even so, he needed her story of what had taken place. There were papers to file, reports to dictate, the Kommandant to appease.

She looked as though she were about to bargain with him. "You will release the fisherman back to his family? And his livelihood? Today?"

He crafted patience into his tone where there was none. "Very well, as it pleases you, Marion. He is only in custody because the Kommandant is on a tear with regard to the loss of the RAF pilot, and also a Zigeuner, a Gypsy, laborer has gone missing. Bringing the fisherman back to Alderney is merely a conciliatory measure to placate him. A _political_ move. Your fisherman is a pawn, only. Gladly I will surrender him to your wishes." He must've said the right thing.

"The flier kept me gagged so that I couldn't speak. He took us to a cave, and we stayed there. I was bound. As last night came on, but before the tide filled the cavern, he uncovered an outboard motor boat hidden there, with electric torches to signal a ship. He cut my bindings, leaving me at the mercy of the cave and the tides, and himself braved the Petit Russel to meet up with his fellows, who had come for him in a U-boat-I mean, submarine. I saw him no more, nor his hidden boat."

He looked to her bare hands, the bandages below them at the wrist. "And your ring?"

"Lost," she said, her gaze steady, "I know not where."

"So you were all along in the caves?"

"Yes, until I found the fisherman this morning."

Geis slid his hand into a pocket inside his uniform's coat, producing a brightly colored scarf as a magician might, to charm a child, but with less panache. He extended the gift to her, nodding. "For your hair," he said. "Your wounded pride. I thought you might wish something." He tried to smile encouragingly.

Gingerly, she took it in her fingertips. Her acceptance of it touched him in a way he would have found difficult to articulate. "I must ask, because the Kommandant will expect to know: How _did_ you come to Alderney that day? By what means?"

"A boy, from a family Cook used to buy from on Sark, the Giddons'."

Gisbonnhoffer's back straightened at the name.

"Their son, Dick," her eyes were cast down, as though chastened. "I bribed him to bring me, for your birthday."

"Yes..."

"And then the flier, he, he killed him, and took the boat." There was something almost wondering in her tone.

He had heard the meat of it, then. "Alright," he crooned, wishing her again deeply in his embrace. "That is enough for now."

Marion let herself tap into real emotion of the event, used it to her advantage to sell the entirety of the (partially) fabricated story of her kidnapping. "No," she protested. "His death was _my_ fault, _and_ the young officer's. Had I not so hot-headedly pursued coming to see you...Had I..."

"They would be alive? The pilot, still my prisoner? The Kommandant not at planning how to reprimand me? You must not think this way, Marion. Such thoughts can consume one. And I," he struggled for the best words, "I _treasure_ that you longed to be near me to the point you resorted to bribery."

He looked at her and saw it. For all their engagement, their imminent wedding and future life together, there was yet something more for him to surmount in their courtship: he did not fully have her trust, her confidence. Not after this.

Of course, Marion had always been cool, aloof, supercilious, even. It was her way, and as a noble lady of considerable rank, her right and privilege. It was one of the things that had first drawn him to her. Her deeper personal emotions, like his, were not always easy for her to access. To someone less perceptive than himself it might be difficult to discern them. If she felt she could not trust him fully, if she felt that he had failed her, that he could have in some way prevented her capture and mistreatment, she _would_ strike out at him, masking her insecurity in his abilities as anger.

But she offered no further acting-out comments or near-challenges to him, and he was hopeful the storm had passed, that the rend in the fabric of their _liebesgeschichte_ was on the mend, and her justified indignation at him had been satisfied.

* * *

"Looking for Kommandant's driver, Lieutenant," chirped a random solider as he stuck his head through the door he had opened, unbidden, and into the Harbormaster's office.

"Out, Private," Gisbonnhoffer barked at the man. "He'll be here, directly, I've no doubt. I've only just left him near-enough his billet on Sark."

" _Left_ him?" came the unexpected (but predictably sharp) voice of the Kommandant himself. "And why on _earth_ would you do that Herr Lieutenant? Was it _him_ you appointed to continue the search for the flier? Was it his boat-the boat that he and other essential Islander workers use to journey here each morning-that you commandeered to ferry your girlfriend to a doctor's appointment? Oh, how-d'ye-do Lady Marion? Hard to see you there, wrapped in the arms of my oh-so-busy Lieutenant. Daring new coiffure, I see. Interesting."

Gisbonnhoffer did not snap to attention with _quite_ the level of immediacy the Kommandant had come to expect. Instead he rose slowly, removing what remained of his embrace of Marion, reached for the screen to replace around her for some version of privacy, and pressed several tablets into her palm, indicating a pitcher of water and a glass sitting on a metal tray at a nearby table. "The doctor said to give you these. They will help you sleep, and restore your strength."

"When you are finished, Herr Geis!" the Kommandant acidly prompted.

"The fisherman?" she asked, accepting the tablets and water obediently.

"My gift to you, _Liebe_." Geis rose, going around the screen and walked to the Kommandant.

"I am of a mind to send you personally to retrieve my stranded driver, Gisbonnhoffer."

Geis held his tongue as he held the door for the Kommandant. In opening it, he nearly collided with Underlieutenant Diefortner, who had clearly taken the decking of the wooden steps so quickly he was all but out of breath. "Personal message for the Kommandant!"

"He is here," Geis lorded over the Underlieutenant, relishing the moment, his tone rife with hauteur.

"What is this?" Vaiser questioned with impatience. "Personal message from whom?"

"The Lady Adalgisa, Baroness Bachmeier," Diefortner consulted the message for the full name of the sender.

"Pardon my indecorous curiosity, Sir," Gisbonnhoffer asked, going out on a limb with the question, "but why would the wife of Gruppenfeldmarschall Baron Diederich von Bachmeier be contacting you _personally_?"

"Because, you idiot lovebird," the Kommandant spit out the abuse, "you useless, mindless pig in need of a good rut to clear your head, she is my ex-wife."

"Your ex-wife, Sir? I thought _she_ had taken Holy Orders and joined the Church?"

"Yes, yes," Vaiser waved his hand at the slight inaccuracy of Gisbonnhoffer's memory and information as he bent his head to read the message himself, "that is Delphinia. Number two, as it were. Sister Mary George or something or other, now." He shook his head dismissively at the thought, " _Adalgisa_ had the bad taste to re-marry after the divorce, and in doing so, to climb the ranks. Which is why I will be unable to refuse her request now, as it comes from the _wife_ of my _superior_ officer." He lifted his head back up to them. "It would very much appear that today I am made, most regrettably, a father." Vaiser stomped off the wood landing at the top of the harbormaster's office with gusto, and down three steps, before he paused and cocked his head, as though he were hearing something eerily in the wind. But in a moment the sensation had passed, and he was back to stomping, expecting the sounds of the lieutenant's and underlieutenant's boots to echo his, theirs only slightly behind him, as he made with haste for the docks and the item left now, at this ominous message's arrival, in his sole charge.

* * *

Geis had left, the Kommandant had left. She was alone for the first time in...since...the night before the morning of October fourteenth. Convinced Geis would do as he promised with regard to Mitch (there could be no good reason to detain him further), Marion gave herself leave to think of her father, of Edward at Barnsdale without her. _That_ had not occurred since before the July Occupation nearly four years ago.

 **Earliest Spring 1940 - London - Brook Street -** Tea at Claridge's. The Nighten name enough to be given a table, without sending word ahead. No need to take the tube to Bond Street, the Reading Room was near enough the Mayfair house for her to walk, or be driven.

 _The first course_ : watercress and cucumber sandwiches in a time so unconcerned with rationing the crusts were cut off and thrown into the rubbish bin before they ever appeared at table. Cheese savories to cause the palate to salivate, merely at the word, 'savories'.

 _The second course_ : scones, baked-fresh, with jam. And, for Clem, Devonshire cream.

 _The third_ : sweets, when sugar was ridiculously abundant, and for Clem, port.

Outside it lightly rained. The kind of rain that might ruin a hat with a peahen's feather, had she forgotten her umbrella, which the chauffeur, thankfully, had not.

The hat, a lovely camel-colored design that hearkened back to the cloche style, had been utterly saved from ruination. It matched the piping on her blouse (cut in a silhouette helped along by shoulder-pads), and the color of her high-waisted skirt. It was a muted ensemble. But it had been (for her, and the European world) a muted Spring.

She had called the meeting of the two of them, his Vauxhall Cross job keeping him so busy now she seldom saw him to speak to. Out of habit she reached a hand to the back of her knee, hidden well-under the tablecloth, and adjusted the seam on her stockings through the high slit in her narrowly-tailored skirt.

She could see her brother sipping at his port, but could also see a tension in his hand where he held the glass. He wanted to be away, to get back to his job, his desk-whatever it was he was doing for the government these days. "I have been to see Mother," she said, thinking of taking another sweet.

"And?" he asked, returning his glass to the table.

She noted his handsomeness, as she always did. 'Handsome Clem', she had heard so often as a child it was a miracle she had not written a song about it. Ah, well, it was not like she disagreed with the summation. Even today she had watched more than one lady's head turn when he escorted her into the Reading Room. "She will not go."

"Well, you cannot be surprised. It is hardly the proper climate for travel. Despite _your_ recent jet-setting."

She slightly scrunched her nose at him. Her trans-Atlantic trip had hardly been a mere act of daredevilry. "You would just leave him there?" She withdrew the telegram she had received to show him. She recounted its contents as he reviewed it, " _Absent-minded, at times incoherent_."

"He is a grown man, Marion. His recovery can be handled without us present." His handsome eyes showed the slightest level of unhandsome irritation at her pressing of the issue.

No wonder women stared at him...he had to be one of the last men of his age in all London wearing neither a uniform nor a wedding ring. "I have taken the liberty of cabling his doctor in St. Peter Port." She withdrew another paper from her pocketbook and handed it to him. Perhaps he was beginning to feel like he _was_ back in the office, after all. "His physical injury may well be long-term. At the least someone must go and see to it he is brought to London. May I mention that we have yet, to this point, to hear from _him_?"

He scoffed. "You know how he hates to send telegrams. How awkward he is about it unless you, or his social secretary, are there to do it while he dictates content. Doubtless he has written to us in the post and it has simply not been received. And the Barnsdale staff have cabled, doubtless, because _they_ wish an increase in wage, having been engaged now well-beyond the usual five-month holiday term during which we arrange all our comings and goings."

"Honestly, does that sound like Mr. Clun to you? Trumping up father's injury in order to strike for higher wages?"

"Well, no. But there you have it: father has Clun, and Cook, and Eva, and..."

"Eva?" her reaction was one of puzzlement. "Whyever would he have need of Eva? She is a ladies' maid. I doubt she is even working at the house."

"Yes, of course," he acquiesced smoothly, "I only meant to highlight that the Guernsey estate is well-staffed for any need he might have, and his doctor there also sufficiently educated to handle his recovery. C'mon, Tigs," Clem reverted to her childhood nickname, when she had developed a strong identification with Beatrix Potter's hedgehog washerwoman Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. (And had been similarly prickily.) He attempted to cajole her. It was something in the past in which he had shown no small talent. "The trip home is short enough for him. He will be back any day, I am sure."

"I agree." She doggedly seized on his assertion. "It is a short trip there and back. And so I shall go, shortly, there, and check on him myself. If he is so well-situated as you believe, I will make the _short_ trip back."

"No," he said.

"And why not?"

"It is not a good time to be traveling, as I have said, and if you go..." he took a short breath, "you will not return."

Her tone was inquisitive. "Why should I not?"

"Because there is nothing of Robin Goodfellow there." He tried not to pause too long on the name. "I daresay I don't know why you came back from America. (Not to mention the fact you have yet to tell me _how_ you did so.) There were no memories for you there of Robin. You were an ocean away from the war, and your letters seemed to show you were having a pretty good time. And yet here, in London-even in the country-I see it, we all see it, in your eyes; that you look for him everywhere. Guernsey and Barnsdale will not haunt you so. It is just where I would encourage you any other year (any other war, even) to go. But it is no time to be traveling. And I do not wish to have to get myself all the way to Guernsey to see you, Tigs. Stay in Mayfair, or go to the country, here."

She leveled her gaze at him. "Is there anything you can tell me, _specifically_ , as to why I should not go?"

He looked defeated. She had called his bluff. "No. There is nothing I can tell you, specifically, as to why you should not go."

"Then," she announced crisply, "I leave tomorrow, three o'clock."

He swore. "You are more intractable than when you sailed with the Mertons. And I cannot, then, see you off. There is a meeting."

"It cannot be cancelled," she asked, without vitriol, "or rescheduled?"

"It cannot. I will have Percival go with you to the docks."

There was a long pause, when it was not apparent if a fight would erupt. If demands would be made, and, by Marion, ignored. She let the tension of the prior conversation roll off her, choosing only to retain the gist of it, and she asked a final, reconciling question, "Will he also kiss me a brotherly goodbye?"

Quick wits and sibling affection had done the trick. At the thought of Clem's button-down valet, Percival, rendering an affectionate buss to Marion's waiting cheek, older brother and younger sister nearly collapsed into undignified giggles.

**...TBC...**


	6. Alderney Arrivals

Allen Dale arrived to find the Alderney docks in a fit of chaos, of last second spit-and-polish shine jobs, sweep-the-dirt-under-the-rug-the-lady-of-the-house-is-coming-down-the-corridor activity. He had no way of knowing it was already the second time today these measures had been enacted.

The Kommandant was re-approaching the docks (having landed at them and disembarked from them less than forty-five minutes ago), with Gisbonnhoffer and Diefortner in tow.

Instantly, Allen popped himself behind a very high coil of rope and several stacked wooden crates.

His best hope for the day, he thought, was to make out as though he had been on the island all along, looking for the Kommandant, and narrowly missing meeting up with him. He did not immediately recall that Vaiser had been planning to be away most of the morning, that he had been off to Jersey the late evening prior. No, Allen's mind, quick as it was, agile as it could be in a pinch, was rather more morosely occupied.

 _Blimey_ , but he had sped to Blind La Salle's farm, fire on his heels. Wings would have been better, but he knew there was nothing angelic in his current mission or message. He had thrown aside every precaution the unit had devised for approaching the farm, every provision they had discussed until blue in the face of what the order of events ought to be to ensure the safety of oneself, approaching, and others, possibly residing for the moment, on the farm. Simply, he ran. Across muddy, uncleared fields, across late-autumnal pastures and grazing lands, vaulting over rock walls and the occasional inner-barnyard fencing of tenements encountered on the way. He ran like a man blind, his path cleared for him, his way made straight by some higher power. He saw nothing, noted nothing. He was not fully conscious, even, of the direction in which he was headed. He could only hear, in each footfall, each intake of breath; " _Colder and louder blew the wind, A gale from the Northeast, The snow fell hissing in the brine, And the billows frothed like yeast...Christ save us all from a death like this...Christ save us all from a death like this..._ "

It was as though his rapid-with-exertion heart beat to the metre of the poem. Odd, that, since before Mitch he had not known, not understood, even, that a poem had an internal metre, like the rhythm of a song.

Those long days (or were they nights? He could not see to have said) following the 'Saintly Six' plane crash, his eyesight gone from him due to the fumes carried on the flames, fearing himself lost, forever condemned to blackness. No longer any hope of ever earning his keep, or even, standing beside his fellows; Robin, John, Royston, Wills...Mitch.

The others were injured, too, in varying degrees of critical. Somehow he had come to be placed by Mitch in their ward. Mitch, who had rushed in after Robin to pull him out before the fire erupted. Mitch, who was the least hurt of all until that moment, and then swiftly became the worst hurt.

Mitch, whom they, to a man, thought would go to his eternal reward, but who somehow managed to carry on, and even improve. Mitch, who spoke...to Blind Allen. To him, at him, about him, of anything, everything; unfiltered, uncensored...unbidden.

Mitch. " _Christ save us all from a death like this..._ " The lines of the poem came to him in Mitch's voice, Mitch, who had, at Blind Allen's desire, re-told and re-told the _Hesperus_ to him to the point that he could recite it himself.

Mitch, who had maybe not saved his life, but had (while at the same time seriously putting a dent in it) saved his sanity. Saved him from depression. Refused to let him wallow in despair and hopelessness. Mitch, convinced he would see again, even when Allen, his eyes and temples in thick bandages, was not.

He fell hard, coming in to La Salle's barnyard, having hurdled one fence too many. Quickly he picked himself up, tried to get his brain to function, his breath to equalize, so that he could speak. As he was doing this, here came Robin, from within the house.

"It's Mitch," Allen said, when Robin was but three paces away.

"What?" Robin asked.

"It's Mitch!"

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"They've taken him. Gisbonnhoffer, Diefortner-an Underlieutenant. Taken him away to Alderney on the boat...with Marion. _In their custody_."

Robin's face clouded over. "You were there? They did not buy the story?"

Allen shrugged and shook his head simultaneously. "No one seemed particularly concerned about the story. Or interested in he _or_ I, but at the last minute, Gisbonnhoffer snatched him up."

"You could do nothing?"

Allen knew Robin did not mean his words to take him to task, but the question stung as much as his inability to take action had. "Robin, I-" he brought his head up to make eye contact from where he had been hanging it as he spoke.

Robin's hand went to his shoulder. "I know, Allen, I know what he means. To each, and to all of us." His gaze was steady, and surprisingly clear. "Now get yourself cleaned-up inside, and off to work."

"Work?" His mind balked at the order. "But it's Mitch!"

"Yes," Robin's reply was a harsh use of the affirmative. "We have paid too dearly for the last sorry-excuse-for-a-plan I devised." Conviction spilled into his voice. "We must not risk Mitch's cover or ours similarly. The flier," he strained to do it, but got it out, " _Mr. Carter_ , says he buried an officer's uniform from his escape near one of the sea caves. Perhaps it may come in useful, it is too early to tell. But we _must_ have you at your post. You are our only link to Alderney, to the camps, and to any knowledge we might gain on where he has been taken, for how long, or how dire his situation might truly be."

The intense dread Allen had been holding back spilled forth out of his mouth like sick. "And for knowing if he breaks."

Robin did not chastise him for his lack of confidence in his fellow. "Everybody breaks, Allen. With our training, he will endure longer than most. And they have no idea, I am sure, whom they've managed to pinch. It is _essential_ that his cover be maintained. It is, right now, all the protection he has." Robin paused, and removed his steadying hand from where it had been at gripping Allen's shoulder. "You were there when he was taken? You were seen speaking together?"

"Yes," Allen feared to confess what he assumed was a fatal slip-up in keeping things covert.

"Good," answered Robin, unexpectedly, nodding his approval. "Then if you encounter him again in your capacity as the Kommandant's driver, it will not seem irregular. You might even pull-off asking a question or two about him...as a neighborly gesture." He inhaled and stood straighter. "Now, Soldier, do as you're ordered: wash up, and get to work."

And so here Allen was, at work, if not in an active capacity, yet.

From the other side of the rope coil and crates he heard the Kommandant gruffly questioning Diefortner, but could not make out the words through the wood and lashings behind which he hid.

* * *

"And how was she brought here?"

"Supply ship, Sir. She has arrived under the care of a Reich Army matron, on loan from the mainland until the girl is safely delivered into your keeping."

Gisbonnhoffer cut in with an interested question. "And what is her name, Herr Kommandant, your daughter?"

"Ah, testing me Gisbonnhoffer?" Vaiser sneered, but with a degree of obvious glee. "I still remember _mine_." Vaiser took a step closer to the ship's gangplank and then seemed to have a change of heart. He spun on his heel and re-made for the direction of the Harbormaster's office. "Have them brought to the office," he commanded, his tone firm and decided. "I shall see them (and sort this) there." He continued on, muttering to himself, "I do not jump like a scalded dog for you, Adalgisa-no matter what your name or title, now. _I_ am in charge here. This is _my_ island. People come to me. _To me_!" He threw a blistering glance to the high coil of rope, spotting someone behind it. "DRIVER!" he shouted, for all to hear. "Fall in line, fall in line. No time for further discussion. Busy day, busy, busy, busy."

Allen Dale did swiftly as he was told, falling in line behind the two lieutenants, and obediently brought up the rear of their tactical retreat to the Harbormaster's office, his pace, as always, more lackadaisical, and less in-step with those in jackboots.

* * *

"You have forgotten about Lady Marion, Sir," Gisbonnhoffer had the misfortune to announce.

"No," Vaiser's answer was quick and clipped. He shared a significant glance with Underlieutenant Diefortner where they all stood just outside the office's main door. "No, I have not. _You_ , Lieutenant, will have to bide your time for an introduction to my daughter. Back to Treeton Camp, assemble your report on the flier, on what you say are his current-unknown, but probably landing-in-England-whereabouts. No more kissy face, no more clumsy wooing on the job. She will still be here, doubtless, when you have a break in your workday. But now," he swept his hand as though he were sweeping a broom, "be gone."

Left without an option, other than disobeying a direct order, Geis went.

Vaiser turned to Allen. "Bring the car around. And wait." He turned his back to consult with Diefortner before entering the office.

* * *

Marion had stuffed the tablets Gisbonnhoffer had given her into the toe of the provided slippers. The last thing she should do, when left alone surrounded by so much German information at the Harbormaster's office, was to drug herself into a sleep, no matter how good letting her guard down and doing so might feel.

Regrettably, the office was incredibly tidy, and files were located in locked filing cabinets or similarly locked desk drawers. The bulk of the information laying about or posted on the walls had to do with the geography of the Islands, and the escape of Thomas Carter. On which she was already, thank you very much indeed, an expert.

It would be insensible for her to attempt to ransack the office, picking locks. Three sides of the long, rectangular building's second floor were glass windows, to enable an unobstructed view of the harbor and the work being done there. This also meant that anyone in the office risked being easily sighted, were they up to something untoward, such as ransacking and lock-picking.

Even so, she slowly rolled the medical screen several feet to the left to the smaller credenza (the larger one, she assumed, was used by the Kommandant (or Harbormaster), and might seem more out of place were it to be obscured by a medical screen), deciding what best might be done.

She did not get very far into her search when she spied Geis' name on some papers on the very top. There was a shipboard-transcribed cable, by the date, received recently, and what appeared to be the makings of a much-crossed-out handwritten reply-in Geis' hand. Both were in German.

" _Beloved husband, noble and heroic father, we greet you with love at your birthday, your brave soldier Hans, your sweet princess Lili, and I, who pray hourly for your safety, long for your arms, and still cherish the distinction of being Frau Gisbonnhoffer, Your Greta._ "

She read it again, then studied what there was of the handwritten reply. Again, she read it, certain there was something wrong with her verb conjugation.

The handwritten reply, which appeared to have been only half-complete or abandoned did not say one word from what she could see telling this Greta woman that her cable had been received by the _wrong_ Lieutenant Herr Geis Gisbonnhoffer, that there had been some mistake.

She read it again, as though the few words had more information to offer up, some redeeming use of idiom or missing umlaut that would invert their meaning, change the truth spelled out in front of her.

* * *

Allen found the car, tidied it up here and there, as usual, and brought it to the base of the wooden stairs by the Harbormaster's office. He needed to get in contact with Anya at the Treeton Camp, as soon as possible. Of the four camps, it made the most sense that Mitch would have been taken there, as Gisbonnhoffer was some version of its overseer.

While he was considering these matters, and attempting to further strategize information-gathering on the island, he noticed some activity at the waterfront. Two figures emerged from the large supply ship docked for unloading. What he wouldn't give to be set loose in there, in all the goods sent from mainland France for the Germans. That'd prove an early Christmas for everyone if he could manage it.

The two figures, plus two armed guards, were walking this way. Both were, surprisingly, female. The one, in Army uniform, was bulky, big-boned, and easy to identify as a matron (of what, he did not know). The other was a slender girl, perhaps eighteen, surely no more. Her long, dark brown hair was in a severe French braid falling well below her waist, and her clothes, though clearly of good quality, were of a design and color so modest and entirely unremarkable as to seem they were those of a religious Order. Her shoes had no height to their heels, under her woolen cape her blouse was buttoned to the neck. She wore no visible jewelry, and her gathered skirt was cut to a length just a whisper above her ankles. Any curves to her figure she may have possessed were a mystery, occluded from view by the just below waist-length capelet and the full, gathered skirt.

As she passed him, headed with the matron up the steep stairs to the second-story office above, he clicked his tongue lightly and winked at her, with a smile.

Surprisingly (for he had had her pegged for it) she did not color with a blush, but looked at him curiously, up and down, as if trying to ascertain what his position was here, this man with a chauffeur's non-military uniform, leaning on the side of the only automobile in sight-and a sharp-looking one at that.

The matron looked to him as though, had her crossing from France been milder, her duty less exhausting, less unpleasant, she might have reprimanded his impertinence toward her charge. She did not, only glanced to him and turned back toward her ascent.

* * *

Marion re-read the cable. She had the screen back to where it had originally been placed, now, and had the cable and the written reply's beginning in her hands, though she had entirely memorized them minutes ago.

She could say nothing. _Nothing_ of this to Geis today. She would have to swallow what he had tried to cause her to do: to unknowingly consent to enter into unholy, unsacred wedlock-to unwittingly become some perverted version of a 'war wife' (she knew the term as well as 'Jerry-bag')-with a man already married, and father to children by his legal wife. Bigamy. Adultery. Fornication.

There was Mitch to consider. Geis had said he would release him. But, her mind stuttered, could a man who would-her hands shook with the papers that had exposed him-could he be trusted? His 'word', on any account? Certainly, it would seem apparent, not in his pledges or troths to her. (Or, it would seem, to his wife, Greta.)

Her thoughts were cut short. Men were walking up the wooden decking outside the door. She stuffed the cables into the pocket of the dress she wore, unable to take the time to fold them neatly, so that they would lay perfectly flat.

The door opened in. Vaiser and Diefortner were already in discussion, as though they had entirely forgotten she was housed there.

"I don't know, Underlieutenant, _what_ to expect," Vaiser was ruminating. "She was eleven the last time I lay eyes on her. Simply, let us hope she has avoided her mother's tendency at certain weights toward an unflattering jowl."

Diefortner cleared his throat. "Lady Marion, Sir," he reminded him.

"Ah, yes, I see no reason why she may not join us at our little reunion. It's turning out to be quite the social day, isn't it? Pity we haven't any good nibbles on hand here, what? Pity. Come out, come out, Lady Marion," he called, as though they were at hide-and-seek. "I shall administer introductions as I see fit."

* * *

"I do not know why I am here!" The girl (she was nineteen, actually, breathing on twenty) almost stomped her foot in childlike outrage. "This is unjust!"

She stood beside the bulky matron who had escorted her from mainland France, while Vaiser had taken his place behind the largest desk, Diefortner at the smaller credenza, and Marion occupied a sofa off to the side and barely noted the goings-on in front of her at all, so hotly did the stolen papers burn within her pocket, and the circular thoughts they inspired about the plight of Mitch.

"Elerinne," Kommandant Vaiser addressed the girl, pretending at patience with her near-tantrum. " _Sweet_ Child. You will let me do the talking just now. Your mother, Adalgisa, bless her, writes to say you have run away from your school _twice_. That you are intent on marrying a certain...Yanick?"

The girl, Eleri, went into near-hysterics. "I love him. We are meant to be together!"

Vaiser chose a calmer counterpoint to her histrionics. "And what would you say, if asked, is this Yanick's nationality? His ancestry?"

Her chin jutted out in instant defiance. Vaiser winced as her jowl became ever so slightly more pronounced.

Her eyes narrowed. "He is a Jew."

"Ah. And his political affiliation?"

Here, only pride. "He fights for the Resistance."

"May I," Vaiser kept his tone light, unaffected by her overt display of dislike and disrespect for him, for any who chose to oppose her. "Do you suppose, ask for further clarification? As: 'anti-Reich' is not quite specific enough to appease my _ravenous_ curiosity where the blushing flower that is my daughter is concerned? Hmm?"

"He is a Communist."

"Yes." His tone flattened. "A _Jewish_ Communist." Then, barely a mumble. "So your mother has written." He clasped his hands together in a loud clap. "How high you do set your sites! Please be informed: who you marry and when, will not be a decision you make. It will be made by your mother (possibly with the help of your step-father) and at my approval ONLY. We have made many decisions already for you in your life. Shall I list them? The decision your mother and I made to go ahead and bring you into this world instead of aborting you. The decision to place you in Ripley Convent's prestigious French school. The decision to have you remain there once your studies were finished until we found that you might prove of some use to us." He took a ragged inhale of breath for the next bit. "RUNNING AWAY TO MARRY A JEWISH COMMUNIST IS NOT OF ANY USE TO US!" He paused. "Would that I were in a better position here, I just might let you do it! _Let_ them take you to a camp to starve and die with him! You little idiot fool!" He seethed, one eye narrowed as he looked at her, his mouth open, panting through his teeth like a predator.

Her entire demeanor continued to be at odds with the meek attire she wore. "I may as well be in a camp now," she baited him with. "I am guarded at all times by _this_ cretin." Her eyes flashed on the matron in outrage. "I am a prisoner, all the same."

As Vaiser began again to speak, he now held even Marion's attention. Cold seemed to seep into the room, to have gathered about them all when they were not noticing, through poor seals on the windows and cracks in the wood of the main door. Everyone, even the matron, seemed to feel the blossoming chill. His voice was nearer a whisper than a murmur, its pace slow and informative. "Oh, no, my dear. Oh, very no. Do not think you have any idea what life is like inside a camp. I have four, here, at my command. Do not pretend you understand, or speak lightly of the experience of so much as a quarter-hour in such a place. For if you do not toe _my_ line, if you do not please _me_ , I may have you escorted beyond the barbwire with but a word. And you will quickly understand what future there is in this world for Jewish Communists...and their seditious wives." He smiled, and Marion herself thought that the exhale through his parted lips was likely, itself, frigid with cold.

Vaiser slapped his hands upon the desk's blotter, breaking the moment's spell. " _Die_ fortner, we shall need a billet for Gruppenfeldmarschall Bachmeier's step-daughter. Fill out the ration request form that way, and even though the ungrateful little twit doesn't seem to wish to identify herself with the Fatherland, make it the ration request form for _German_ nationals. Have the supplies readied."

The girl, Eleri, responded with a question containing a good helping of derision. "Have you no house, here?"

The Kommandant only smiled dismissively at her tone. "I live on this island, my little dumpling. You may trust, in the _very_ best house. But this is a military installation. There is no civilian population, nor any provision for such. For all that you are a self-proclaimed Jew-lover, I'll not have you here to tempt my men away from their chores." He bent to the pad from which Marion had ripped the written-on page. "I say, Lady Marion," he asked, as cordially as ever, "spot me that pen, would you?" he indicated the one he wished for her to bring him.

Marion stood and crossed the room with the pen stand and inkwell, both her hands occupied in the task, setting them down where he could reach them.

"Ah!" he sang out, his hand to her hip pocket before she had seen his scheme. "Passing love letters with my Lieutenant, are you?" He unwrinkled the paper, and unfolded the cable. "What's this?" his eyes grew round as he looked up at her, "I am shocked! Appalled! Diefortner," he asked of the just-returned Underlieutenant, "had you any idea of this?"

"Sir?" Diefortner asked, his face curious, but blankly clueless.

"Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer. Had you any idea he was married-with two children? I tell you I am shocked! Simply shocked!" Momentarily he inclined his head to Marion, concern for her well-being all over him. " _La-dy_ Marion, _surely_ you must wish to return home, to, oh, yes, that _is_ unfortunate...to Herr Geis' billet on Guernsey. That lovely large house, with that generously-sized staff. Hmmm. _Yeeees_ ," he noisily shoved back the chair he was seated in. "I believe I have solved everyone's problems. I shall escort you home, immediately. My driver will come as well. And I will see Elerinne well-settled at Barnsdale _with_ you." It was not a request for an invitation.

He indicated Diefortner, "see to the boat, have it packed with whatever she brought with her of her things. (I shall search them myself when we arrive.) Oversee the loading of the rations and what else you might feel is needed. We leave as soon as may be." He rolled his eyes heavenward. "At some point in this day, surely, I will be able to finally get to work!"

He could not know his driver, a story below, yet unaware that he was to be off to Guernsey by hour's end, was thinking the very same thought.

**...TBC...**


	7. Carter's Confession

**Alderney - Treeton Camp -** Gisbonnhoffer was in a particularly foul mood, well beyond what the men under his command had come to understand as his usual, familiar sulkiness. He had not wanted (nor expected, in the wake of recovering Marion from the flier and seeing her battered condition) to be immediately returned to his duty, though he had not fought the order, knowing it was better to be condemned to long hours at the camp, at his job, than reprimanded by the Kommandant, or, worse, to lose his position over occurrences of the last few days easily attributed to his incompetence (even if that blame was debatable).

He had just been setting down to work on the report of the flier's escape when a landser was at his open door, standing somewhat expectantly just outside the doorframe.

" _Ja_?" Geis growled at him.

"Herr Lieutenant, Sir," the young landser all but shook in his boots, "the prisoner is ready for you."

"Prisoner? What pris-" Geis let out with a heavy sigh and a collapse of his shoulders. _The fisherman_. Marion's Sarkese fisherman. His chair screeched back from its place as he pushed it from the desk with his weight still in the seat, his demeanor reverting quickly from frustration to the detachment of all-business. "What have you done to him?" He strode purposefully out of the main office hut, and toward the blockhouse of holding cells, expecting the landser to follow in his wake.

"Only the usual, Sir. Though, Specialist Joseph is with him now, and he's brought in _die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_." The landser slightly cringed at the thought of the dread device.

"And you perpetrated this under whose orders?"

"Um, standard...procedure, Sir. Specialist Joseph knew that you prefer to have prisoners loosened up before you speak to them."

"Yes?" Gisbonnhoffer half-shouted over his shoulder. "Well, this one was not meant for harsh treatment."

The landser could not conceal his surprise at this news. "Well, I, uh, suppose we could clean him up..."

"Don't be ridiculous," Gisbonnhoffer came to an abrupt stop, and spat out, "for us to enact our techniques on a prisoner, even one merely meant to be detained, and then not to even attempt an interrogation, but rather clean him up, shake his hand and send him on his way? We would be a laughing stock to anyone he mentioned his experience to! What's done is done. _I_ shall question him. You may leave _die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_ set up in the room. Specialist Joseph, however, in this instance, is dismissed. Go in and tell him so."

"Sir." The landser quickly did as he was told, opening the door to the small room that had been set up for such activities.

The smell of _die maschine_ wafted toward Geis on the air as the door shut behind the landser. Nothing he had ever encountered quite smelled the same, the tincture in the air a combination of fear, sweat, damp porcelain, and unbridled electricity. Usually, the scent gave him a special charge, a feeling of purpose and near-triumph. It often signaled victory as close at hand.

 _Die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_ was not a 'technique' many men withstood for long. The flier had spent more than a fair share of time with it. So much so they had once run low on kerosene, and had to send for more. But then, Flight Commander Thomas Carter had not been just any torturee. He had well-proven that in more ways than simply being able to evade the machine, and his inquisitors.

Specialist Joseph exited the room, a clear look of confusion and disappointment on his face at being sent away. Gisbonnhoffer chose to roll his eyes rather than make eye contact with the underling whose only possible recommendation for himself was that he was a master at hurting others.

Geis pushed open the door into the interrogation chamber. Before him sat, behind a smallish table (just for what might be needed in the use of some of the hand-operated implements for various 'techniques'), the fisherman. He looked to be of his late twenties, early thirties, with hair somewhere between dirty blonde and light ash. His face was bearded, as, at this time of year many Islanders' (especially fishermen's) were. His build was unassuming. Geis noted he sat considerably well in the chair for someone already subjected to the 'loosening up' process.

* * *

Here came the Lieutenant, Geis Gisbonnhoffer, opening the door to the room. Mitch could not tell much about him, his vision was still quite blurry about the edges, and he knew he'd have burst blood vessels in his eyes (and possibly face) come tomorrow morning. Now there, he almost laughed in his head. He and Robin had seen plenty of those, but the acquiring of them had never been painful, only had nursing same the next morning.

"Mr. Miller," the Lieutenant said, queerly offering him a nearly formal address, "my superiors have some questions about your time with the escaped prisoner's hostage." He cleared his throat. "I mention my superiors so that you know it is best to keep this between you and I, at the lowest level possible, so that I will not have to call on anyone...more _skilled_ at asking such questions. Do you understand?"

Mitch nodded, his injured tongue, he thought in working order, but no need to take the chance and find it was not yet ready to move, only to slaver and slur.

He was in an absolute devil of a situation, between Scylla and Charybdis if he had ever been so. Unit 1192's training had never been for long-term undercover work, they had trained for swift in (via parachute) and swift out (plane to England, or boat to surfaced submarine pick-ups). And that, in Occupied Mainland Europe.

The torture training scenarios they had been put through were ones in which they had been taken by the enemy, and known to be military. So; name, rank, serial number. Supposed eventual trip to a designated POW camp, and new mission: escape.

Or (as they were often apprised), unmasking as spies and firing squad, _if_ that nice of a treatment. They owned and wore no uniforms, had no military identifying pins (as Mr. Carter had his RAF wings, his Flight Commander insignia) or ribbons, no papers attesting to such. No version of accurate identification at all, as they were...dead to the Empire. They were the ghosts of the war. The enemy was lucky to catch one, luckier still to be able to keep such a spectre once caught (assuming Jerry knew, even, what he had pinched).

But here, on Alderney, Mitch was a mere fisherman, with an incomplete cover story. After all, he had been meant to be the fisherman for but a handful of hours this morning. No longer. He would have to try, unrehearsed, to smoothly marry his Sark cover to this new wrinkle of owning a fishing boat as best he could, staying true to the impeccably forged identification papers and permits that he had been carrying at the time he was taken.

And it had been damn rotten hard to think and plan for such when these godforsaken Jerries had been sticking him with things and hurting him to distraction.

He _had_ decided it would appear very suspect if a common fisherman with nothing to hide refused to speak, or refused to answer their questions, particularly under such duress. And so he purposed to answer them as normally and consistently as possible in the hopes of maintaining plausibility.

* * *

"You are from Sark?" the Lieutenant asked, his black-gloved hands folded on the tabletop. "Born there?"

"I was born a Guernseyman. I came to Sark to supplement it with essential workers in the raising of crops and livestock for the Reich." He thought referring to Germany as 'the Reich' offered a nice touch of respect.

"A Guernseyman!" Geis seemed positively chuffed. "I did not know this! You have family there?"

"I am a single man, my parents have passed."

"Passed? Passed as what?" The English idiom was lost on Geis. He took it to mean something along the lines of Jews hiding their identity, 'passing' as Gentile.

Mitch attempted to clarify. "They have passed...into Eternity. They are deceased."

"Ah. You have other family?"

And so things went for awhile. They might have been at getting to know one another over tea, had their surroundings been different. And had Gisbonnhoffer offered similar information about himself in turn.

"Might I have a glass of water?"

"Certainly," Gisbonnhoffer consented, shouting through the door to have a pitcher and glass brought.

As he took it to drink, Mitch (in the character of the concerned, Good Samaritan fisherman) speculated aloud, "bet the Lady Marion was glad to get herself one of these. She was looking worse for wear, wasn't she?"

" _The Lady_ Marion?" Geis' until-then open face constricted with immediate interest at Mitch's wholly proper use of Marion's title. "Looking worse for wear? You two are acquainted? You know what Lady Marion usually looks like?"

He scrambled for conversational veracity like a cat seeking traction on ice. "Well, that is, we, erm, being a Guernseyman...one knows of the Nighten family and Barnsdale, surely."

"Does one?" Gisbonnhoffer queried, not entirely convinced. "And what might _you_ tell me of _her_? That _I_ don't know?" For the first time he became aggressively an intimidator, leaning across the table to increase his nearness to Mitch's face. "Let us reminisce. I am her fiance. Surely you are aware of this, Mr. Miller, as you are unmasked as so _intimately_ familiar with her ladyship."

* * *

**Sark - Farm of Blind La Salle -** "Never made a coffin before," Wills Reddy announced as he stood in the front sitting room looking at where they had laid out Dick's body in it. He did not mention that yet turning in his mind was knowledge of the larger islands, the severe shortage of wood there as civilian coal rations were meager, if any at all, and in the coming winter Islanders would soon be back to burning books and furniture and anything to keep warm and cook what food there was, taking in bracken, gorse and seaweed for fuel, no doubt, as the early settlers on Sark had when the small island was found originally to be lacking in trees.

"It is of sturdy, strong work, and respectfully done. A fine box, Wills," Stephen assured him as his questing fingers examined Wills' handiwork.

His ears were less obstructed by John's gauze swathing of the night before, as Abby Rufford had sent one of her young sons to fetch the island's doctor over to have a look. The doctor had done what he might (the gang hidden from sight in the barn at the time), and re-bandaged them, making allowances for Stephen being able to hear.

Moments after completing his ministrations toward his living patient, he set to completing the necessary clerical work to declare Dick dead, and make way for the afternoon funeral to come.

"Would that you could attend, Dr. Battley," Stephen had told him, by way of invitation.

"Would that I could, also. Dick was a good boy, if sometimes not the sharpest of lads." He smiled wistfully for the boy he had known from birth. "But you must keep it a small, supremely quiet gathering, La Salle," he counseled, his voice low but insistent. " _I_ cannot come and risk being punished for taking part, for the Germans might well have me sent away, or detained, and then who would nurse the island in my absence? But I know, also, the island needs _you_ , needs this tenement and what it stands for. After what you have told me (and what gossip is circulating the island) of yesterday, you have caught the eye of this Lieutenant, and in your refusal of him you have perhaps foolishly made an enemy where a friend would have proven far more beneficial. He knows you now. You have raised his ire. It is not the wisest of moves to allow illegal meetings on your property just twenty-four hours later."

"It may not be smart," Stephen easily agreed, "But there is wisdom in it, I assure you, as it is the right thing to do."

"And what do you tell the Germans when they come, finally (as you have tweaked their noses one time too many), to ask if you are harboring Jews, escaped prisoners, or stranded RAF pilots?"

"I do not lie, Battley. That is the answer you are looking for."

"And that, La Salle, is where we differ entirely. I will never reconcile my scientific mind fully to your faith-filled one, for all that you can debate science with me as well as any man I know. For when the day comes the Germans ask _me_ about Jews and prisoners and stranded RAF pilots, _I_ will lie. And lie and lie, and I will keep on lying until St. Peter meets with me at the Pearly Gates and settles the question one final time as to which answer to this situation is most-acceptable to our God: mendacity in favor of saving lives, or truth (and faith in Heaven's intervention) at any cost." He closed his doctor's bag at this, his work done. "Now, if you simply leave them alone and packed as I have done for you, I shall return in a day or two-I will give plenty of notice of my approach before reaching the house, on account of your... _dogs_ -" (he indicated his understanding that unexpected visitors were complicated to accommodate on the farm at present) "and I shall re-examine them." On went his hat, with a farewell nod. "Good day."

Stephen came out of the memory, and continued his praise of Wills. "Dick's parents will be proud to have him in something more than a simple shroud."

"I, for one," Robin offered from the horsehair armchair, where he stood from sitting, "trust we will find more _hopeful_ work for your craftsman's hands in days to come." His lips stretched in approximation of a grim smile. He had not shared the news of Mitch's uncertain fate with the gang entire, yet. He had hoped to wait for the funeral, for which some few of them, at least, might risk being present. Johnson and Royston had gone ahead to scout among what was left of the mines' entrances on Little Sark, their physical presences rather too memorable for gatherings of any size.

As for the present conundrum of Mitch? What could be done, really, until Allen returned with word, any word? One could not assault Alderney entire, certainly. It was a veritable bastion of Jerry strength and firepower. The population depleted down to only six civilians following the pre-Occupation evacuations. Without a populace, among whom could one hide? Among only the military, which had infused their stronghold with all their impressive might.

Without a specific idea on where to look for Mitch, or where he had been taken and for what, anyone without permission caught on the island would meet a fate likely worse than that which Mitch (thought to be but an inconsequential fisherman) currently endured. It was mere hours since Bonchurch had been taken. The time for last-ditch wild-hair plans was not yet.

For the moment Robin played the game of wait-and-see, though nothing about such a tactic, at present, struck him as sporting.

The noise of a man approaching the entryway to the room prompted the two sighted, and one blind to turn in that direction.

Thomas Carter, hair not yet dry from Stephen's homemade lice-cure, had seemingly wandered down the short stub of a hall in search of who-knew-what, but certainly not the sight that met his eyes.

He had a towel thrown about his shoulders, and had been taking the corner end of it to dry out one of his ears. He had momentarily shucked off his RAF coat, leaving only the white undershirt below. Even so, he had assiduously affixed his wings and other crucial insignia to the ringed collar of the t-shirt, ensuring that he would be properly identified as standard military if he were captured, even in this brief moment, even from this place that seemed to him so far from camps or Nazis of any kind. Yet, even here, his wary, ever-vigilant mind saw to it he could not (unlike the others, perpetually out-of-uniform, unidentified as British SIS, about him) be taken for a spy.

The shirt he wore no longer clung to him, as it had the night he bailed out into the sea. The fit muscles it had once showcased were no longer ridged to impressive effect within it. Instead, it fell slack across his shoulders, looking what seemed like stretched-out across his chest. Weeks of Nazi privation and cruelty had shrunk not only his chest, but his waistline, and his trousers barely hung upon him, their belt taken immediately by his captors, not to be returned lest he fashion himself a weapon of it and its buckle...or a noose.

His face, clean-shaven for the entirety of his adult life, bristled with blonde whiskers longing to grow wild, within an inch of his eyesockets, across the swell of his Adam's apple, and down to his collarbone where it wished to marry with the hair on his chest. He desperately longed to have it gone, to find his face again, and felt thankful for the German's small allotment of food to him in this one thing: had they fed him better, doubtless it would be a far bushier thatch of which he sought to rid himself as soon as a razor could be located.

Had he been offered a razor earlier, he would gladly have used it on his head, removing the need for any lice-killer remedy, curious to see if the sensation of baldness would have been as fascinating and freeing as Babushka had read the Grand Duchesses had once claimed it was following their joint illness from measles in a letter smuggled out from their captivity to family members who had hand-copied its contents and sent it to Babushka.

That thought, so unreal, having so little to do with the present moment, came like an unexpected hiccup, his eyes widening in reaction to it having slipped out from behind the locked-gate of his past, and his turning over of it was what had propelled him to the archway and caused him to forget what he knew was beyond.

His hand froze for a moment with the towel to his ear, his eyes glommed on to the side of the coffin. From where he stood, gorgonized, only just inside the arch, he could not yet see into it.

It surprised no one that Robin, highest ranking officer present, spoke first. His tone was cooler than it had been to the flier previously, but cutting, a dagger's edge painted with poison. "You are not wanted here."

Carter did not retreat, nor did he advance. And, in fact, he averted his eyes from Robin's gaze, as a dog might in an effort to sidestep an apparent challenge. As Oxley was the undisputed ranking officer, it was understood by both rivals that it was Carter's job to take (and never rebel against) whatever was dished out. In another world, another lifetime, one in which American Thomas Carter would need never have been invented, he would have been Prince Komonoff, commander of men, of entire armies. Here, he was ever under another's authority. He had long ago accepted this.

Wills had gotten enough out of Carter the night before of the flier's first brawling encounter with an unintroduced Robin near La Seigneurie to fear what might occur next. With an intake of breath he made to move himself between the two men, separated now by just more than half the length of the modest sitting room. But before he could take a step, the back of Stephen's warm hand was to his chest, in a mild gesture to hold him off.

"Robin, if you will indulge me," the blind rector said in a voice that could not have been mellower, yet no less deliberate, "I think you will find that it is for me, and me alone, to decide who is not wanted in my own home, and where."

In the face of the unexpected assertion of local authority by Stephen, Robin ceded the point. But he did not do so meekly. "Very well," his voice was all challenge. "Let him have his look." He took a threatening step toward Carter, whose eyes remained floorward. "What?" Robin again taunted him, looking seconds away from a headbutt, or intimidating chest bumping. "Don't want it now? Changed your mind, Flyboy?" The emotion visible in Oxley was no longer one of singular rage and anger with the flier; his eyes took on a deeply pained quality, as of one tormented by personal culpability, by guilt. "Look at him!" he half-shouted, his hand grasping Carter's shirt as though he would pull him by force to the open casket. His other arm stretched out into a hand pointed at Dick's body. "He gave all for you! _Know_ his face! Honor him at least in that, that you do not look away."

But Carter's upper body was slack, without the taut, scrapping emotion Robin seemed desirous of bringing out in him. He was without further fight. He did not say that had this been any other house, any other day, he would never have been able to recognize the boatman he shot through the heart, even had his own life depended upon such an identification. Such was the utter lack of attention he had paid to him, the lack of connection that the being in the way of him and that boat-of escape-was a life. Was a _person_. He had been, rather, a target, an obstacle. A removable hindrance.

 _Boom_. One shot. One kill. _My boat_.

"He is Dick Giddons," Stephen offered, his tone compassionate where Robin's was accusatory. He spoke on conversationally, as though Robin's outburst had not occurred. "Within the hour his parents, and others who knew him, will be here to celebrate his life, and honor his passing." He turned his face to Oxley, "Robin, would you be so good as to help Wills find the remedy I prepared, so that he may dose himself and the boy? Thank you." He made the appeal sound as inconsequential as any slight favor he had ever requested. He also made it firmly apparent that, for the moment (as his earlier words had illustrated), Blind La Salle was taking charge in his own home, and Robin, and his at-present tumultuous behavior, was no longer welcome inside the archway of his front sitting room.

With a look from Stephen to Carter, and then one back to Dick, which he significantly brought back to Carter, Robin left the room for the rest of the house, Wills following after.

In the wake of their departure, Stephen smelled something in the room's air, not as pungent as the lice-cure's potent ingredients, but far more familiar. It would have been difficult for him to describe to a sighted person. It was a smell of colors, of some way in which he could sense another person's desires, their needs.

Were Louise here to ask him to define it, he would have told her it smelled something, perhaps, of hyssop; it sounded of cracked-with-age desperation, and felt of the texture of a tree branch no longer green enough with life to bend, that had broken cleanly away from its source: the tree.

Therefore, he was not at all astonished when the flier spoke without being in any way further prompted.

"I have committed crimes," Carter declared, his voice low, but easily audible. "Heinous crimes."

Stephen could not see Carter, but when the RAF flier's uneasy eyes flicked over to the former rector's unseeing ones, searching for some signal that he had been heard, that his admission would not be taken lightly, or worse, cause him to be rejected, Stephen spoke to assure him, answering his announcement with a statement of insight. "And so, you do not wish to look back. Because you don't like to see what you've done."

Carter found that it was easy...far easier than he would have imagined, to let his guard fall away in the presence of this other man, this man who could not watch him struggle to contain his emotions, who would not see any tears ready to, or already, falling.

Something in Stephen La Salle, he could not have said what, (his _dooshcha raskaz_ , his 'soul story' Babushka would have said) told him, had this man sighted eyes, still, these things would have been easy to risk in front of him.

"I..." Carter began again, uncertain, truly, of where to begin. "...have not looked back-I have not wished to see what I have done, in so long...I, I have not been Confessed in nine, nearly ten, years." He tried for a small scoff there, but it sounded more of a slight sob. "Reddy claims you for a holy man, a minister of some sort?"

Stephen smiled encouragingly at the other man. "I was a rector, now retired. I will willingly hear any you have to say, but you must know that I am of the Methodist faith. You referenced confession as a proper noun." He slowly shook his head. "I am not of a denomination, nor a personal persuasion, that would hear such a Confession as you reference and believe myself empowered to offer an Absolution. Nor would I be willing to pretend at prescribing such."

"No," Carter said, in understanding, his voice gentle as a whisper.

Stephen returned himself to the horsehair chair Robin had vacated, pulling a simpler straight-backed wooden one directly across from it, so that it faced him. Nothing in the air that he could discern between he and Carter had changed with his explanation of not being able to preside over a capital-C Confession. He pulled his pipe out of his shirt pocket and brought its stem close to his mouth. "Will you sit?" he asked. "Perhaps, you would like to start with what has altered, Thomas, with what has set your path so that now you find yourself wishing to account for your actions over this past decade?"

"Please," Carter removed the towel from his shoulders, hanging it across the back of the straight-back chair to dry, and he took a knee next to Stephen. "Can I ask a favor, first?"

"Ask," he encouraged, his expression warm and willing.

"Here," Carter's breath caught with the knowledge of what he was about to break with-such a longstanding practice of enforced forgetting, "within this room, just now, can you call me Alexsei?" He felt his eyes swimming in water and struggled not to blink until it had equalized. "Just for the time we are speaking together like this, as a man of God and...whatever it is I've become?"

Stephen could not see the blonde hair of the man before him, the facial features, but he well-recalled that the boy Djak understood only limited Russian, and that this was the only man present who knew how to speak it to him. Perhaps he should not have, perhaps it was a gesture too familiar, but he nonetheless placed his hand on the flier's head, inadvertently echoing the action of one invoking a holy blessing. "Very well, Alexsei," he encouraged him to go on, "what has changed?" He felt Carter's-Alexsei's-head dip down under the palm of his hand, not in an effort to avoid his touch, but as though under a psychological weight that only Alexsei might see, might feel.

"The night I was shot down...I fly Spitfires. You know them?"

Stephen agreed he did. "The fast little RAF fighter planes. I am told by Mitch they saved much at Dunkirk."

"They seat one man: a pilot. A man who never has to look back. He has no crew," he shook his head. "No responsibility as such. If things go badly, if he errs in judgment, he is answerable only to himself, and he alone will suffer for it. A perfect match, the Spitfire and I."

The kitchen clock chimed the quarter hour. The house seemed empty of any but themselves, Wills and Djak not able to be heard about. Robin, if he was about, off to himself, well out of earshot.

"The night I became the Jerries' prisoner, when they pulled me from the sea, was not a normal mission. For reasons I am not at liberty to share, I was flying a bomber. The kind Eagle Squadron's Spitfires generally escorted. The bomber had a complete crew of ten. Many of them were men I knew. Some I had reason to admire. And when we took ack-ack, and I knew us for lost, though I tried my best first to keep us going and make a rough landing near St. Malo, and then attempted to allow us and our chutes to aim for the dry patch of Burhou, still, more than half the crew perished in the sea before the Jerries arrived. The rest they shot where we stood on the deck of their vessel, the blood in their veins still cold from the sea." His voice had unintentionally taken on a shivering quality, as though he still stood on that deck, drenched, breathless, longing for warmth. "Myself, I had stopped some years ago counting my personal number of kills, but suddenly I was seeing deaths _because_ of me, because of what I had done. Where I had failed. Like Pedersen," he stopped, surprising himself by letting the name slip out. That name from what seemed so long ago, on the Finnish Front.

* * *

They talked on. Rather, he spoke at length for some time, as the blind rector attentively listened.

The kitchen clock struck the half.

"There was a girl-a woman," he said. He could not recall ever having spoken about her before, never in all the bars, locker rooms or war rooms he had ever occupied when such conversations might arise. "In America. Her name was Tasha. From before the war."

"Russian?" Stephen asked, inferring it from the name.

"No," he replied, "her family were third generation, Polish immigrants."

"So it is really like that, there, as they say? Everyone living all together?"

Carter thought for a moment. "Some places," he agreed.

"And this woman, Tasha?"

"She loved me," he said, his eyes nearly taking on a shine, an unseen inner light he had yet to display for longer than even Stephen could have imagined. "I...accepted things from her, certain gifts, certain," his voice nearly broke and he stopped speaking to recompose himself so that he might continue. "I was not honorable in my actions toward her. What she chose to give, I took. But ours was not a reciprocal relationship. I did not love her. I tried-I thought, I hoped beyond hope that her love of me would eventually inspire, give birth to," he rolled his eyes ceiling-ward without explanation over the expression he found himself using, "that I would, in being loved, find myself loving her in return." He was standing behind the empty straight-back chair, his hands fists over the drying towel, knotting it about the chair back's two spindle knobs in a gesture of agitation. "But I think, that is, I have come to believe, I am... _broken_ in that way. That there is something defective in my make-up where love is concerned. Do you believe that is possible? That one may be so?"

La Salle did not immediately answer the question. He let it steep into the air a moment, as he would the leaves for a good tea. "I think that many people who do not know what it is to be loved, find it everywhere, and with many people, and frequently discover all too late that they have settled for a mere shadow of love at its truest. I think that some _other_ people who do not know what it is to be loved find themselves frustrated as time goes past them, as they search and search, wishing to find only that purest, essence of love as a reality, refusing to settle for the artifice the world so often offers in place of the true." He re-pocketed his pipe, never having lit it. "Hearts have their own timetables. When I am one-hundred will I know all there is to know of the many loves possible? No. And yet, do you now know more of love than you did when last you saw Tasha? If you have a better understanding of yourself, Alexsei, then I say, yes." Stephen paused. "And I think, rather, I _know_ , that if you are, as you claim, in someway broken in that respect, you may be repaired. You may be healed."

"I think," Carter told him, though he did not share Zara's existence with the rector, nor mention her name, "despite all these years at war, at some point, some tendril of...what I can only call love (as I have said, I know so little of it) crept near my heart. I don't know how, in all this, in such a black and empty spot it could even find sustenance to grow, but somehow, I know it is there." He exhaled through his nose. "And instead of that tendril being choked out by what I've filled that space with..." he could not go on, he could no longer prevent himself from laughing on the wrong side of his face.

Stephen finished it for him. "You find instead that you can less and less abide the darkness."

Again, Carter took a knee at the side of the rector. "For the first time in so long, I feel as though I have been attempting to nourish myself on poison. And for the first time, it is more than I can bear." He used the heel of one hand to scrape away the water of his tears. He looked to Dick Giddons' casket. "Do you not hate me for what I have done? For the killing of your friend? It was done, as I'm sure you know, in cold blood, and without a thought for him, or his soul. The commanding officer here, Oxley, he is right, no doubt, to treat me as he does: with repugnance, without respect."

Stephen tensed in his seat, the clogged-with-tears voice of the man to his side calling out to his heart, with its desire to offer comfort and reassurance wherever possible, but the question was a fresh one, and one that still yet stung. He said a small inner prayer for guidance as he spoke to answer it. "I would be a poor example of a minister were I to choose consciously to hate, and to wish to feed that hate with wicked actions and thoughts. I am grieved," his voice dropped to a low register it seldom used, its tone there, shaky, "that Dick is dead. Grieved, more, that you were the one to end his life. I would that I might have _you_ rescued to safety, and _him_ alive as well. But that is not to be so. To kick against what is injures only the kicker, and changes not a thing." He cleared his throat of its oncoming tears, "Perhaps, having become blind after a mostly-sighted life, I have learned this lesson better than others." He swallowed, regaining his emotional balance. "Perhaps it is only my pride that thinks so." He smiled. "Robin," he took a breath, referencing his friend, "struggles with your being here just as much (if not more) for your violence toward the Lady Marion. Perhaps you might express your contrition to him. (As I am assuming you already have to the lady, herself.) It may do some small good, but you must remember, earthly consequences still exist for God-forgiven actions."

Carter squeezed closed his eyes at the kitchen clock chiming quarter 'til. He felt exhausted beyond further exertion.

"We will, I hope," Stephen stood from his chair, knowing his guests would soon enough arrive for the funeral, "speak again like this, Alexsei. As for Robin, though I have not known Lady Marion and he together, I do have the distinct feeling that being without her at the moment has him set off-balance. Certainly he is feeling the separation most keenly." He chuckled as he said, "When Mitch returns he will inform you all about it, and their life before the war. He is a veritable Homer when it comes to the tales of his fellows! As for you, and your future here (as long as you might stay), it has been discussed and planned. You are to become my cousin, arriving to help in the wake of the loss of Dick's. The islands are crawling with La Salles. No one will be able to keep straight from which branch of which La Salles you are come." Without invitation, he held his left hand out to find Carter's face.

Carter, who had also stood to depart the room in light of the soon-to-arrive mourners, reached hesitantly for the rector's fingers and guided them to his features.

"Yes, good, a nice scruff coming on!" he praised Carter's bristles. "Don't cut it. We will decide later on a robust mustache, I think, and Robin says you're light of hair and brows. True?"

"True enough," Carter agreed.

"I will mix you a dye, then, one Louise's mother, my _belle-mere_ , liked best to cover her aging tresses. We shall christen you a dark-haired La Salle before sunrise tomorrow." He half-grinned at this notion. "And then, the hardest part."

"Something dangerous?"

"Yes," La Salle nodded. "Before dawn you must sneak down to the docks and walk the road back here with Wills (who I will send down to the docks so that it will seem he is to fetch you), so that all the island may agree that you arrived the day after Dick's funeral, as you had been sent for, and that you may be known." He stopped for a moment and considered. "Mitch will be best to guide you there. We will speak more about it later today, when he returns."

* * *

**Alderney -** It was quite late in the day when Gisbonnhoffer exited the interrogation chamber. He was determined to make for the Harbormaster's Office and Marion, whom he had left waiting there, before nightfall. He would brook little that got in his way of such.

The sight of Specialist Joseph, as distasteful as always, proved more dismaying than usual, as it appeared the other man had been hanging about, waiting to speak with him.

"Ask 'im," he declared, darkly, and without preamble. "Ask 'im how he got the marks on his torso."

Geis all but forcibly shouldered his way in disgust past the man. "Sorry?"

"Well," the Specialist sneered on, "I weren't gonna to tell you, on account of you sent me away during the good bit, but _ask_ him. When I was at my work I seen marks; scars and stitchings on his chest and back." He raised his unkempt eyebrows significantly. "Marks that don't make any sense for a fisherman's body to wear. Ask him how he come by 'em, that trauma." Here his overt curiosity turned to suspicious and insecure jealousy as he demanded, "Was it someone else's work? Whose? I'd like to meet 'em, I would. Like to take some notes on how they does it."

Gisbonnhoffer had only half-listened to the repellent soldier speak. " _Really_ , Joseph," he smirked his reply, speaking at all only to conclude their non-conversation as quickly as possible, and see himself on his way, "I'm not of your ilk, panting to see a man shirtless. But as you have expressed such interest, I warn you: he is fully mine now, to do with as I please. You may keep yourself away from him and your pet, _Die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_. You will be summoned if I find I should need you. Until such time, find a hole, Man, and trouble me no longer with your...appetites." He nearly spat the last word.

**...TBC...**

* * *

* _Die Sinnesschmerzmaschine_ \- babelfish German for 'the Mind Pain Machine'


End file.
